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LIBRARY OR CONGRESS. 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 



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IN PROSE AND VERSE 



RICHARD HENRY STODDARD. 



NEW YORK: 

GEORGE W. HARLAN & CO., Publishers, 

44 WEST 23d STREET. 
1883. 




Copyright, 1882, by 
GEOEGE W. HARLAN & CO. 



H. J. HEWITT, PRINTER, 27 ROSE STREET, NEW YORK. 



TO 

Soijn (Kveenleaf S2ai)tttfet, 

WITH THE LOVE OP 
HIS FRIEND, 

R. H. S. 



ANCESTORS. 

Boast not these titles of your ancestors. 

Brave youths ; they're their jMssessions, none of yours 

When your oicn virtues equalled have their names, 

' TwUl be but fair to lean upon their fames. 

For they are strong supporters ; but, till then, 

The greatest are but growing gentlemen. 

It is a icvetched thing to trust to reeds ; 

What all men do, they urge not their own deeds 

Up to their ancestoj's ; the river's side, 

By which you're planted, shows yovrfniU shall bide ; 

Hang all your rooms with one large pedigree : 

' Tis virtue alone is true nobility. 

Which virtue from your fatJier, ripe, will faU ; 

Study illustrious him, and you'll have all. 

Ben Jonson. 



'Tis poor, and not heconung perfect gentry. 
To build their glories at their fathers' cost ; 
But at their oivn expense of blood or virtue 
To raise them living monuments. Our birth 
Is not our own act ; honour upon trust 
Our ill deeds forfeit; and the wealthy sums 
Purchas'd by others' fame or sweat will be 
Our stain ; for we inherit nothing tndy 
But u'hat our actions make us tvorfhy of. 

Chapman and Shirley 



SALVE. 

The race of greatness never dies. 

Here, then, its fiery children rise, 
Perform their splendid parts. 
And captive take our hearts. 

Men, ivomen of heroic tnould 
Have overcome us from of old ; 

Crowns waited then, as now, 

Fm every royal brow. 

The victor in tlie Olympian games— 
His name among the proudest namM 

Was handed deathless down : 

To him tlie olive crown. 

And they, the poets, grave and sage. 
Stern masters of the tragic stage. 

Who moved by art austere 

To pity, love, and fear- 
To these was given the laurel crown, 
Whose lightest leaf conferred renown 

That through the ages fled 

Still circles each gray head. 

K. H. Stoddard. 



THE PASSING-BELL. 

Hark ! haw chimes the passing-bell. 
There^s >w musick to a knell : 
All the other sounds im hear 
Flatter, and but cheat our ear. 
This doth put us still in mind 
That our flesh must be resign''d, 
And a general silence made. 
The world be mvffied in a shade. 
He that on his pillow lies, 
Tear-embalm'' d before he dies. 
Carries, like a sheep, his life 
To meet the sacriflcer's knife. 
And for Eternity is prest. 
Sad bell-wether to the rest. 

James Shirley. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY OF LONGFELLOW. 



Elements of French Grammar. Translated from the French of C. F. 

L'Homond. [Boston: 1830.] 
Orioin and Progress op the French Language. North Amer. Rev. 

33. 277. [April, 1831.] 
Defence of Poetry. North Amer. Rev. 34. 56. [Jan., 1832.] 
History of the Italian Language and Dialects. North Amer. Rev. 

35. 283. [October 1832.] 
Syllabus de la Grammaire Italienne. [Boston: 1832.] 
CouRS DE Langue FRANgAiSE. [Bostonj 1832.] 

I. Le Mhiistre de Wakefield. 

II. Proverbes Dramatiques. 

Saggi de' Novellieri Italiani d'Ogni Secolo: Tratti da' piii celebri 
scrittori, con brevi notlzie intorno alia vita di ciascheduno. [Bos- 
ton: 1832.] 

Spanish Devotional and Moral Poetry. North Amer. Rev. 34. 277. 
[April, 1832.] 

CoPLAS DE Manrique. A translation from the Spanish. [Boston : Allen 
& Ticknor. 1833.] 

Spanish Language and Literature. North Amer. Rev. 36. 316. 
. [April, 1833.] 

Old English Romances, North Amer. Rev. 37. 374, [Oct,, 1833.] 

Outre-Mer: a Pilgrimage beyond the Sea. 2 vols. [Harpers: 1835.] 

The Great Metropolis. North Amer. Rev. 44. 401. [April, 1837.] 
A lively review of a new work on London, 

Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales. North Amer. Rev. 45. 59, [July, 
1837.] 

Tegner's Frithiofssaga. North Amer. Rer. 45, 149. [July, 1837.] 

AjfGLO-S.AXON Literature. North Amer. Rev. 47. 90. [July, 1838,] 



Vlll BIBLIOGRAPHY OF LONGFELLOW. 

Hyperion : a romance. 2 vols. [New York: 1839.] 
Voices OF THE Night. [Cambridge: 1839. J 

Reviewed in North Amer. Rev. 50. 266-269; Christ. Ex. 28. 242. 
The French Language in England. North Ainer. Rev. 51. 285. [Oct. 

1840.J 
Ballads, and Othjbb Poems. [Cambridge : 1841.] 
Poems on Slavery. [1842.] 

Composed during a return voyage from Europe, in 1842. 
The Spanish Student: a play in three acts. [1843.] 
[Editor.] The Waif: a collection of jwems. [Cambridge: 1845.] 
[Editor.] The Poets and Poetry OF Europe. [Philadelphia: 1845.] 
The Belfry of Bruges, and other poems. [Boston: 1846.] 
[Editor.] The Estray : a collection of poems. [Boston: 1847.] 
Evangeline: a tale of Acadie. [1847.] 
Kavanagh: a tale. Prose. [Boston: 1849.] 
The Seaside and the Fireside. [Boston : 1850.] 
The Golden Legend. [Boston: 1851.] 

Reviewed in BlacJcicood, 5. 71 ; in Eclec. 4th s. 31. 455. 
The Song of Hiawatha. [Boston : 1855.] 

Reviewed by Rev. E. E. Hale in North Amer. Rev. 82. 273. 
The Courtship of Miles Standish. [Boston: 1858.] 

Reviewed by A. P. Peabody in North Amer. Rev. 88. 275. 
Tales OF A Wayside Inn. [Boston: 1863.] 
Flower DE Luce. [Boston: 1867.] 12 poems. 
New England Tragedies. [Boston: 1868.] 

I. John Endicott. 

II. Giles Cory of the Salem Farms. 

Reviewed by E. J. Cutler in North Amer. Rev. 108. 669. 
Dante's Divina Commedia. A translation. [Boston : 1867-70.] 

Three vols. I. Inferno. II. Purgatorio. HI. Paradiso. The same 

in one vol. 
Reviewed by Charles Eliot Norton in North Amer. Rev. 105. 125 ; 
by George W. Greene in Atlantic M. 20. 188. 
The Divine Tragedy. [Boston : 1872.] 
Christus: a Mystery. [Boston: 1872.] 

Collecting, for the first time, into their consecutive unity : 

I. The Divine Tragedy. 

II. The Golden Legend. 

III. The New England Tragedies. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY OF LO.VGFELLOIV. 



Three Books of Soxg. [Boston : 1872.] 

Aftermath. [Boston: 1874.] 

The Masque of Pandora, and othei- poems. [Boston : 1875.] 

[Editor.] Poems OF Places. 31 vols. [Boston: 1876-1879.] 

Keramos, and other poems. [Boston: 1878.] 

Ultima Thule. [Boston: 1880.] 

The Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Containing 
a superb new steel portrait by Wm. E. Marshall, and illustrated 
by more than six hundred wood-engravings, designed especially 
for this work by the best American artists. [Houghton, Mifflin 
& Co. : 1881.] 



II. 

ADDITIONAL NOTICES OF MR. LONGFELLOW, 

Arnaud, Simon. La Legende Doree. [In Le Correspondant : 10 

Juillet, 1872.] 
Cobb, J. B. Miscellanies. [1858.] pp. 330-357. 
Curtis, G. W. Atlantic Ilotithly, 12. 269. 

Mr. Curtis's "Easy Chair" in Harper's Ifonthly contains notices of 
Mr. Longfellow and his writings, as follows : the " Dante," 35. 
257; "Reception in England," 37. 561 ; "New England Tra- 
gedies," 38. 271; "The Divine Tragedy," 44. 616. There is 
also a general article on Longfellow in 1. 74. 
Cochin, Augustin. La Poesi'e en Amcrique. [In Le Correspondant : 

10 Juillet, 1872.] 
Depret, Louis. Le Va-et-Vient. [Paris : n. d.] 
The Same. La Poesie en Amerique. [Lille : 1876.] 
De Prins, a. Etudes Americaines. [Louvain : 1877.] 
Priswell, J. H. Modern Ifen of Letters. [1870.] pp. 285-99. 
Gilfillan, George. Literary Portraits. Second Series. [1849.] 
Palmer, Ray. Longfellow and his Works. Lnt. Rev. [Nov., 1875.] 
Peck, G. W. Review of Mr. Longfellow's Evangeline. [New York : 

1848.] 
P. T. C. Kalevala and Hiawatha. A review. [185-.] pp. 21. 
Whipple, E. P. Essays and Reviews. 1. 60-61-62-63. 



X BIBLIOGRAPHY OF LONGFELLOW. 

III. 
TRANSLATIONS OF MR. LONGFELLOW'S WORKS. 

ENGLISH. 

Noel. [A Frencli poem by Longfellow in Flower de Luce.] Tr. by J. 
E. Norcross. [Philadelphia : 1867. Large paper. 50 copies 
printed.] 

GERMAN. 

Englische Gedichte aus Neuerer Zeit. Freiligrath, Ferdinand. . . . 

H. W. Longfellow. . . . [Stuttgardt und Tubingen : 1846.] 
Longfellow's Gedichte. tJbersetzt von C;irl Bottger. [Dessau : 1856.] 
Balladen und Lieder von H. W. Longfellow. Deutsch von A. R. Nielo. 

[Miinster : 1857.] 
Long fellow's Gedichte. Von Friedrich Marx. [Hamburg und Leipzig; 

1868.] 
Longfellow's altere und neuere Gedichte in Auswald. Deutsch von 

Adolf Laun. [Oldenburg : 1879.] 
Der Spanische Stmlente. Ubersetzt von Karl Bottger. [Dessau : 

1854.] 
The Same. Von Maria Helena Le Maistre. [Dresden : n. d.] 
The Same. tJbersetzt von Hafeli. [Leipzig : n. d.] 
Evangeline. Aus dem Englischen. [Hamburg : 1857.] 
Tlie Same. Aus dem Englischen, von P. J. Belke. [Leipzig : 1854.] 
The Same. Eine Erzahlung aus Acadien. Von Eduard Nickles. 

[Karlsruhe : 1862.] 
Tlie Same. tJbersetzt von Frank Siller. [Milwaukee : 1879.] 
77(6 Same. Ubersetzt von Karl Knortz. [Leipzig : n. d.] 
Longfellow's Evangeline. Deutsch von Heinrich Viehoflf. [Trier : 

1869.] 
Die Goldene Legende. Deutsch von Karl Keck. [Wien : 1859.] 
The Same. tTbersetzt von Elise Freifrau von Hohenhausen. [Leipzig: 

1880.] 
Das Lied von Hiawatha. Deutsch von Adolph Bottger. [Leipzig : 

1856.] 
Der Sang von Hiawatha. tTbersetzt von Ferdinand Freiligrath. 

[Stuttgardt und Augsburg : 1857.] 



BIBLIO GRA PHY OF L ONGFEL L IV. XI 

Hiawatha. Ubertrageii voa Hermann Simon. [Leipzig : n. d ] 

Dsr Sa)tj von Hiawatha. tTbersetzt, eingeleitet und ericlart von Karl 

Knortz. [Jena : 1873.] 
Miles Standish's B raid werb wig. Aus dem Englischen von F. E. 

Bauingarten. [St. Louis : 1859.] 
Die Brautwerbimg das Miles Sfandish. tlbarsetzt von Karl Knortz. 

{Leipzig : 18 — .] 
Miles Sfaiidish's Braiifwerbiing. tTbersetzt von F. Manefeld. [1867.] 
Die Sage von Konig Olaf. Obersetzt von Ernst Rauscher. 
The Same. tTbersetzt von W. Ilertzberg. 
Dorfschinid. Die Alfe Uhr auf der Treppe. Des SJclaven Traum. 

Tv. by H. Schraick. Archiv. f. d. Stud. d. n. Spr. 1858. 24. 214- 

317. 
Oedichte von H. W. L. Deutsch von Alexander Neidhardt. [Darm- 
stadt : 1856.] 
Der Ban des Schiffes. Tr. by Th. Zermelo. Archio. f. d. Stud. d. n, 

Spr. 1801. 30. 2D3-304. 
Hyperion. Deutseh von Adolph B'ittger. [Leipzig : 1856.] 
Ein Psalm des Lebens, etc. Deutsch von Alexander Neidhardt. 

Archiv. f. d. Stud. d. n. Spr. 1856. 29. 205-203. 
Die Oottliche Tragddie. tTbersetzt von Karl Keck. [MS.] 
The Same. tTbersetzt von Hermann Simon. [MS.] 
Pandora. Ubersetzt von Isabella Schuehardt. [Hamburg : 1878.] 
Morituri Salutamus. tibersetzt von Dr. Ernst Sshmidt. [Chicago j 

1878.] 
The Hanging of the Crane — Das Kesselhdngen. tTbersetzt von G. A. 

Ziindt. [n. d.] 
The Same. Das Einhangen des Kesselhakens, frei gearbeitet von Joh. 

Henry Becker, [n. d.] 



Het Lied van Hiawatha. In het Nederdeutsch overgebragt door L. S. 

P. Meijl)oom. [Amsterdam : 1862.] 
Miles Standish. Nagezougen door S. I. Van den Berg. [Haarlem : 

1861.] 



Hyperion. Pa Svenska, af Gronlund. [1853.] 
Evangeline. Pa Svenska, af Alb, Lysandei*. [1854.J 



XU BIBLIOGRAPHY OF LONGFELLOW. 

The Same. Ofversatt af Hjalmar Erdgren. [Goteborg : 1875.] 

TJie Same. Ofversatt af Piiilip Svenson. [Chicago : 1875.] 

Hiawatha, Pa Svenska af Westberg. [1856.] 



Evangelim. Paa Norsk ved Sd. C. Knutsen. [Christiania : 1874.] 
Sangen om Hiawatha. Oversat af Gr. Bern. [Kjiibeuhavn : I860.] 



Evangeline ; suivie des Voix de la Nuit. Par le Chevalier de Chatelain. 

[Jersey, London, Paris, New York : 1856.] 
The Same. Conte d'Acadie. Traduit par Charles Brunei. Prose. 

[Paris : 1864.] 
Tlie Same. Par Leon Pamphile Le May. [Quebec : 1865.] 
La Legende Doree, et Poemes sur I'Esclavage. Traduits par Paul Blier 

et Edward Mac-Donnel. Prose. [Paris et Valenciennes : 1854.] 
Hiawatha. Traduit de I'Anglais par M. H. Gomont. [Nancv, Paris : 

I860.] 
Drames et Poesies. Traduits par X. Marmier. The New England 

Tragedies. [Paris: 1873.] 
Hyperion et Kavanagh. Traduit de I'Anglais, et precede d'une Notice 

sur I'auteur. 2 vols. [Paris et Bruxelles : I860.] 
The Psahn of Life, and Other Poems. Tr. by Lucien de la Rive in 

Essais de Traduction Poetique. [Paris: 1870.] 



Alcune poesie di Enrico W. Longfellow. Traduzione dall' Inglese di 

Angelo Messedaglia. [Padova: 1866.] 
Lo Studente Spagnuolo. Prima Versione Metrica di Messandro Baz- 

zini. [Milano: 1871.] 
Tlie Same. Traduzione di Nazzareno Trovanelli. [Firenze : 1876.] 
Poesie sulla Schiavitu. Tr. in versi Italiani da Louisa Grace Bartolini. 

[Firenze : I860.] 
Evangelina. Tradotta da Pietro Rotondi. [Firenze : 1857.] 
Ihe Same. Traduzione di Carlo Facoioli. [Verona : 1873.] 
La Leggenda d'Oro. Tradotta da Ada Corbeliini Martini. [Pariua : 

1867.] 



BIBLIOGRAPFIY OF LONGFELLOW. XIU 

11 Canto d' Hiawatha. Tr. da L. G. Bartolini. Frammenti. [Firenze : 

1867,1 
Miles Standish. Traduzione dalT Inglese di Caterino Frattini. [Pa- 

dova : 1868.] 

PORTUGUESE. 

El Rei Roberto de Sicilia. Tr. by Dom Pedro II., Emperor of Brazil. 

[Autograph MS.] 
Evangelina. Traducida por Franklin Doria. [Rio de Janeiro : 1874.] 
The Same. Poema de Henrique Longfellow. Traducido por Miguel 

Street de Arriaga. [Lisbon : n. d.] 
The Same. By Flavio Reimar, in the Aurora Brazileira, 1874 ; and by 

Jose de Goes Filho, in the Ilunicipio, 1874. 



Evangelina. Romance de la Acadia. Traducido del Ingles por Carlos 
Morla Vicuna. [Nueva York : 1871.] 

POLISH. 

Zlota Legenda. Tlie Golden Legend, Tr. into Polish by F. Jerzierski. 

[Warszawa : 1857.] 
Evangelina. Tr. into Polish by Felix Jerzierski. [Warszawa : 1857.] 
Duma Hiaivacie. The Song of Hiawatha. Tr. into Polish by Feliksa 

Jerzierskiego. [Warszawa : I860.] 

RUSSIAN AND OTHER LANGUAGES. 

Excelsior, and otiier poems, in Russian. [St. Petersburg : n. d.] 
Hiawatha, rendered into Latin, with abridgment. By Francis Wil- 
liam Newman. [London : 1862.] 
Excelsior. Tr. into Hebrew by Henry Gersoni. [n. d.] 
A Psalm of Life. In Marathi. By Mrs. H. I. Bruce. [Satara : 1878.] 
Tlie Same. In Chinese. By Jung Tagen. [Written on a fan.] 
The Same. In Sanscrit. By Elihu Burritt and his pupils. 



There is one point in relation to the works of Longfellow which de- 
serves especial mention. It is the frequency with which his poems have 



XIV BIBLIOGRAPHY OF LONGFELLOW. 



been selected by composers for musical illustration. Some of them arc 
the following-; 

Operas. — " The Miisque of Pandora," libretto arranged by Bolton 
Rowe, music by Alfred Cellier ; ''Victorian, the Spanish Student," 
libretto by Julian Edwards, music by J. Reynolds Andei'son. 

Cantatas. — " The Wreck of the Hesperus," composed by T. Ander- 
ton ; "The Consecration of the Banner," by J. F. H. Read ; "The 
Building of the Ship," by J. F. Barnett, another by Henry Lahee ; " The 
Golden Legend," by Dudley Buck, another by the Rev. H. E. Hodson ; 
"The Bells of Strassburg Cathedral" (from "The Golden Legend "), 
by Franz Liszt ; " The Tale of a Viking " (" The Skeleton in Armor "), 
by George E, Whiting. 

Two, Three, and Four-Part Songs. — " Stars of Summer Night," by 
Henry Smart, Dr. E. G. Monk, J. L. Hatton ; "Good-Night, Beloved," 
by Ciro Pinsuti, J. L. Hatton, Dr. E. G. Monk ; " Beware " (" I Know 
a Maiden "), by J. L. Hatton, J. B. Boucher, H. De Burgh, Mrs. Moun- 
sey Bartholomew, M. W. Balfe ; "The Reaper and the Flowers," by 
J. B. Boucher, A. R. Gaul ; "Song of the Silent Land," by A. R. Gaul, 
A. H. D. Prendergast ; "The Curfew," by T. Anderton, P. H. Diemer, 
W. Macfaren, Henry Smart; "The Davis Done," by A. R. Gaul; 
"The Hemlock Tree," by J. L. Hatton ; "The Village Blacksmith," 
by J. L. Hatton ; "King Witlaf's Drinking-Horn," by J. L. Hatton ; 
"The Arrow and the Song," by Walter Hay; "The Wreck of the 
Hesperus," by Dr. H. Hiles ; "A Voice came over the Sea" ("Day- 
break"), by F. Quiun ; "A Psalm of Life," by Henry Smart, Dr. 
Mainzer ; " The Rainy Day," by A. S. Sullivan ; "Woods in Winter," 
by W. W. Pearson ; " Up and Doing," by Dr. Mainzer ; " Heart 
Within and God O'erhead," by Rossini ; "The Nun of Nidaros" and 
"King Olaf's Christmas," from the "Saga of King Olaf," by Dudley 
Buck ; the latter two being choruses for male voices, with solos. As 
for songs for a single voice, they are very numerous. 



Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 



I HAVE set myself a difficult task in undertaking 
to write and edit a Medley wliicli shall concern itself 
with the life and works of Mr. Longfellow, but, hav- 
ing undertaken it, I purpose to go on with it to the 
best of my ability. About the middle af April, 1878, 
I resolved to spend a few weeks on the seashore of 
Massachusetts, and, not wishing to be entirely idle 
while there, I procured the complete writings of Mr. 
Longfellow, with the intention of making a study 
thereof for the pages of Scribner's Monthly. T Avas, 
of course, familiar with the body of his poetry and 
had a tolerably clear idea of his prose, but this did 
not satisfy me. I determined, therefore, to read the 
books which I was to take with me, to make notes as 
I read, and not write until I had reached conclu- 
sions which I was prepared to stand by. I tried to 
be critical : I know I was conscientious. 

Before leaving town I naturally communicated with 
Mr. Lonrfellow, and in what follows I shall make 



2 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

some use of his answer, or answers, to my informal 
notes. Mr. Longfellow's first reply, which is dated 
at Cambridge, Ai)ril 20, 1878, needs no comment : 

"Dear Mr. Stoddard: In the 'Homes of Ameri- 
can Authors,' published by Putnam of your city in 
1853, you will find on page 265 a view of the house 
in which I was born. It is still standing, overlook- 
ing the harbor, as you see in the picture. 

"Before I was two years old the family removed to 
a house in the centre of the town. Of this house, 
where my childhood was passed, I send you a photo- 
graph. The upper room in the left-hand corner, with 
the open windows, was mine. 

' ' I am glad you are going to take the trouble of 
writing the Sketch for ScHbner. If there is to be any 
biography in it, please say that the family came from 
Yorkshire, not from Hampshire, as usually stated ; 
and that my wife died at Rotterdam, and not Heidel- 
berg. 

"This is, perhaps, of no real importance, but, 
generally speaking, fact is better in history than 
fiction. 

"Any other doulDtful points I shall be happy to 
settle for you, if you will put them in the form of 
questions. 

" You must greatly miss your friend Taylor. Still, 
I rejoice in his ai^pointment. He will fill the place 
better than any other man. 

' ' Yours very truly, 

' ' Henry W . Longfellow. ' ' 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 3 

The substantial facts of Mr. Longfellow's life down 
to the summer when I wrote were as follows : He was 
born on the 27th of February, 1807, at Portland, 
Maine. The family, as he said, came from York- 
shire, where tlie first of the name were found in 1510 
living in and about Ilkley. They axDj)ear to have 
been sons of the soil. That is to say, they took their 
name from some ancestor, or town, or trade — quite 
likely from some ancestor whose height suggested 
and justified the name of Longfellow. The original 
Longfellow, John, a day-laborer, petitioned for a 
tenement which belonged, I believe, to^ the Middle- 
tons, in whose possession it still remains. He was a 
laborer in 1523, when he paid the price of one day's 
w^ork — fourpence — to aid the King in his war with, the 
French. Farm-hands in the beginning, and then 
farmers, a Longfellow in the reign of Henry YIIL 
was the wealtliiest man in his neighborhood, and 
shortly before the Reformation two of tlie family 
were vicars of churches. They started in poverty, 
nevertheless, and so went on, handing down the bap- 
tismal John. There was a John William Longfellow 
in the third generation who had the lime-kilns of 
Ilkley, for Avhich he paid a rent of twenty shillings 
per annum. They married daughters of the soil, 
buxom lasses, whose sturdy descendants still till the 
fertile meadows of Yorkshire. Tradition savs that 



HENJ^Y WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 



they would help themselves to green yews for bows, 
and would keei^ dogs to hunt game — misdemeanors 
for which they were rei^eatedly fined. 

It becomes me to say here that I am indebted for 
what I state in regard to the ancestry of Mr. Long- 
felloAV to my good friend Robert CoUyer, who has 
kindly loaned me a discourse which he delivered 
upon the Longfellows in England at the Messiah 
on the 9tli of April and which, I think, is to foi-m 
part of a future volume. He traces the Longfellow 
family through its Johns and Williams until he finds 
upon the old church register a William, tlie son of 
a Jolm, who was baptized at Ilkley on the 22d of 
February, 16||, and whom the vicar of Ilkley be- 
lieved to be the founder of the family. According 
to a record among the vicar's papers, he settled in 
Newbury, Massachusetts, where he married Anne 
SeAvall on the 10th of November, 1676, a person 
of some consequence, who bore him three sons and 
two daughters. He was an officer in the Essex regi- 
ment, and was drowned oif Cape Breton in an expe- 
dition against the French and Indians. The particu- 
larity of this account would seem to authenticate it, 
but it does not; for while it corresponds with the 
account to which I gave currency four years ago, at 
least as far as the place of settlement of this Wil- 
liam LongfeUow, the maiden name of the lady whom 



HENRY WADS IVOR Til LONGFELLOW. 5 

he married, and his death by drowning are concerned, 
it does not correspond with what I believed to be the 
year of his birth, which I then fixed upon, 1651 — an 
error, if it be an error, which was not perceived or 
not corrected by Mr. Longfellow, who did me the 
honor to read the proof of my Sketch. 

Either I am no genealogist, which is likely, or, 
which is quite as likely, the genealogy of the Long- 
fellows in America is somewhat uncertain. I have 
been consulting the Journals of those old-time Port- 
land dominies, Thomas Smith and Samuel Deane, 
and I find in the entries of the first, under the date 
of April 11, 1745, "Mr. Longfellow came to live here." 
Then, in a note, several Longfellows are bunched to- 
gether. As first, the one wiio went to Portland at 
the time specified — Stephen, who was graduated at 
Harvard College in 1742, and who, the son of an ear- 
lier Stephen, was born at Byfield in 1723. The first 
of the name in New England (the note asserts) was 
William, grandfather and great-grandfather of these 
Stephens, who married Mistress Anne Sewall in 1678 
and settled at Byfield, where he became a merchant. 
But William is declared a little later not to have 
been the first who emigrated, but to have followed 
an older relative, a brother perhaps, a Stejihen, who, 
I imagine, was from Ilkley. Another Stei)hen, a de- 
scendant in the third or fourth generation, married 



6 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

Mistress Tabitlia Blagdon, of York, in 1749, by wliom 
he liad tliree sons, Stephen, Samuel, and William, 
and a daughter Tabitlia. The first of these, born 
in 1750, married Mistress Patience Young, of York, 
in December, 1777, who was the mother of another 
Stephen, who rose to provincial eminence. He was 
for about fifteen years master of a Grammar School ; 
for twenty-five years Parish Clerk ; for twenty-two 
years Town Clerk ; for many years Clerk of the Pro- 
prietors of the Public Land ; and, from the incor- 
poration of the County in 1760 to the beginning of 
the Revolution in 1775, Register of the Probate and 
Clerk of the Judicial Courts. He died in 1790, at 
Gorhani. His son Stephen, who was Judge of the 
Court of Common Pleas from 1797 to 1811, died in 
Gorham in 1824 at the age of seventy-four. He 
left a son Stephen, who was born in April, 1776, 
and who was graduated at Harvard in 1798, He es- 
tablished himself at Portland, where for forty years 
he was a magnate of the town. He was a member 
of the Hartford Convention, and afterwards, when 
the position was esteemed honorable, a member of 
Congress. He married Tal)itha, a daughter of Gene- 
ral Wadsworth, who in the fulness of time was the 
mother of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Such, as 
nearly as I can make it out, is the tangled genealo- 
gy of the American Longfellows. When I add to 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 7 

this tliat the early emigrant "W^illiam Longfellow is 
reported to have been drowned at Anticosti, a large 
desert island in the estnary of the St. Lawrence ; that 
the last Stephen Longfellow, besides being President 
of the Maine Historical Society, was a good jurist, as 
the Massachusetts and Maine Reports testify ; and 
tliat his wife was a descendant of the valorous John 
Alden, as was also the mother of William CuUen 
Bryant, I have done with jDedigrees. 

The Portland to which Mr. Stephen Longfellow 
removed at the beginning of the present century 
was a town of less than four thousand inhabitants. 
It stood upon a little promontory fronting Casco 
Bay, at the eastern end of which was his man- 
sion — an old-fashioned, wooden, two-storied dwell- 
ing, such as is common in !N"ew England, about a 
stone's throw from the water. It remains pretty 
much as it was, though it has been repaired of 
late years, and is now occupied by several Celtic 
families, whose fathers, and brothers, and sons, and 
cousins are employed in the Eagle Sugar House, 
the storehouse of which is adjoining. The country 
quietness which originally characterized the place 
still nestles in its old gardens and around the sha- 
dows of its stately elms. Besides these were trees, 
and vines, and flowers at the corner of Fore and 
Hancock Streets, where the Longfellows lived, and 



8 HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 

there was a wilderness of greenery in the Eastern 
Burying Ground, w^here, surrounded by the dust of 
earlier generations, side by side, like brothers who 
had sheathed their swords, slept the brave com- 
manders of the BlytJie and the Boxer. 

The peoj)le of Portland were plain, simple folk, 
seafaring traders, whose packets went to the West 
Indies laden with Northern notions, and return- 
ed with rum, sugar, molasses, and other ' ' W. I. 
Goods." Craft of all sorts lay at their wharves, 
and sailors of different nationalities sauntered along 
their streets and alleys, singing naval ditties about 
Lawrence, and Hull, and Perry. Though no par- 
ticulars of the life of Master Longfellow have yet 
been vouchsafed to the outer world, it is certain 
from his parentage and the period wherein he lived 
that he was tenderly and thoughtfully nurtured. 
We may readily imagine that his good mother 
taught him the ali)habet ; that he learned to read 
out of the Bible ; that he was familiar with the 
hymns of Watts and Doddridge ; that he was pre- 
sent at the morning and evening prayers of the 
family ; that he went to Sunday-school twice a 
day, and sat drowsily through the sermon. All this 
goes without saying, for it was the custom of New 
England at the beginning of the century. The 
church to which he was carried, or led, was doubt- 



HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 



less tlie First Parish Meeting-Honse, wliicli was 
erected in 1740, and was extant nearly a century 
later. It was builded after the sacred architecture 
then in vogue, and was an oblong box of a build- 
ing, with a tall, spire steeple, an entrance in front, 
and a porch entrance upon one of its sides. Such a 
church, though apparently not so large, and minus 
the tall steeple, is now extant in Hingham, and it 
may be accepted as a representation of the old 
meeting-house at Portland. Within the pews 
branched off on both sides of the aisles, and the 
male and female members of the congregation were 
apart by themselves. The pulpit was reached from 
a platform by a staircase of polished mahogany 
banisters and rungs. There was a door behind it 
that opened into a chamber in which the minister 
put on his robe and bands. Above it was a sound- 
ing-board, and below^ the railed space of the altar. 
A gallery ran round three sides of the house, where, 
in high pews and on hard seats, sat bolt upright 
the unruly urchins of the parish, under the eyes 
of their theological guardians, who kept them in 
order, and when they could — awake. Facing the 
pulpit was the choir, the members whereof warbled 
their native wpod-notes wild to the music of a 
bass-viol, and, it may be, the rumbling of an organ, 
rising to sing as their leader struck his tuning-fork, 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 



and I'ollowing the precentor line by line. Add to 
this the long i:)rayers, the longer sermons, the pass- 
ing round of the contribution-boxes, and the doxo- 
logy, yon have a tolerably accurate picture of the 
meeting-house of our fathers. 

As the Longfellow brood grew larger we may con- 
ceive of them as studying their lessons out of the 
same books ; doing their sums upon opposite 
sides of the same slates or blackboards ; reciting 
in the same classes ; going to and from school morn- 
ing and evening with their satchels, and enjoying 
the same childish games and sports. Their Wed- 
nesdays and Saturdays were holidays — the latter, 
however, only till sundown. We may imagine all 
happy things of these rosy Longfellow children and 
thcii- comi-)anions. They are in the dusk of the 
best room, where the blinds are not allowed to let 
in much sunshine ; they are in the garret, rummag- 
ing over the faded tinery of their ancestors ; they 
dibble in the garden \\\ their own little plots of 
ground ; they pluck flowers, climb trees, tell stories, 
sing, and live as if life were to be always as bright 
as then, and as if (ah, that if !) there were to be no 
more graves ! Sometimes thej'- strolled about the 
wharves on Fore Street, and watched the sunburnt 
sailors with rings in their ears, 

" Full of strange oaths, and bearded like a pard," 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOIV. rr 

hoisting out hogsheads and bales, and lowering 
them on drays, and taking into their dark holds 
cargoes of Yankee merchandise. Or they sat be- 
neath the elms in the Eastern Burying Ground, 
under the infinite, cloudless summer sky, and gazed 
down, uj), and out along the shimmering waves of 
Casco Bay and its multitudinous wooded islands. 
That such a childhood as I liave imagined for the 
young Longfellows was not entirely imaginary is 
evident from one of Mr. Longfellow's poems, writ- 
ten in the maturity of his powers, and with the re- 
meml)rance of Portland vividly before him. As a 
proof of this I copy here the third stanza of "My 
Lost Youth " : 

" I remember the black wharves and the slips, 
And the sea-tides tossing- free ; 
And the Spanish sailors vvitli bearded lips, 
And the beauty and mystery of tlie siiips. 
And the magic of the sea. 
And the voice of that wayward song 
Is singing and saying still : 
■ A boy's will is the wind's will, 
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.' " 

There were several clever lads in Portland at tliis 
time who went to the same school, or schools, as 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and among them 
was John Owen, who, I believe, was a cousin, and 



12 HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 

who was his constant companion in after-life. He 
was about a year tlie elder, and he has outlived his 
illustrious friend less than, a month, for while I am 
writing these paragraiDhs the journals contain the 
intelligence of his death on the 22d of April, at 
Cambridge. Another of his schoolfellows was pro- 
bably Nathaniel Parker Willis, who was also a 
year his senior, and who was to achieve poetic dis- 
tinction at about the same time as himself. Other 
Portland boys and men of this or a later period 
were Isaac M'Lellan, John Neal, and Seba Smith, 
all of whom figure in our poetic anthologies — self- 
appointed, patriotic laureates of the woods, waters, 
and warfare of their native land. They might have 
said of themselves, as Dr. Johnson said of himself 
and his fellow- students at Pembroke, "We were a 
nest of nightingales." Master Longfellow is known 
to have written verses in his childhood, and on his 
seventy-fifth birthday there was exhibited at Port- 
land, I think in a room of the Maine Historical 
Society, a copy of one of these jwnenilia^ which I 
remember to have read at the time, and which I 
hope to recover before this Medley is finished. 
Like Dr. Bryant, Mr. Longfellow was proud of the 
genius of his son. 

That young Mr. Longfellow had already obtained 
a good education, either at the public schools, or 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 13 

by diligent coaching under accomi^lislied masters, 
is certain, or he could not have entered Bowdoin 
College, as he did, in his fourteenth year. Had 
his father followed his inclinations he would, no 
doubt, have sent him to his own Alma Mater ; but 
Cambridge is a long way from Portland, and 
Brunswick was nigh at hand, — so to Brunswick the 
lad was sent. It is a charming spot, I hear, on the 
right bank of the Androscoggin, at the head of 
tide- water, with shady woods in which there are 
winding walks, with falls that recall, on a small 
scale, the cataract of Yelino, and with a bridge or 
two over the roaring and tumbling river, down 
which in spray drifted the clamped logs of the lum- 
bermen. Bowdoin College was ojjened about the 
time when Mr. Longfellow went to Portland, and 
Seba Smith was graduated there three years before 
Henry Wadswoi'th was entered. It was a famous 
class in wLich he found himself, for before many 
years were over the names of four of its members 
had flown to the ends of the earth. These were 
Nathaniel Hawthorne, orphan son of a sea-captain 
of SaleiA, Mass ; John S. C. Abbott, son of pious 
parents, notorious twenty-five or thirty years ago 
for his " Life of Napoleon " ; George B. Cheever, who 
turned the flood of public indignation upon Deacon 
Giles's Distillery, and was afterwards a pilgrim under 



14 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

tlie shadow of Mont Blanc ; and Jonathan Cilley, 
whose forte was i^olitical debate, and who went down 
in the prime of his manhood before the deadly rifle 
of Graves, of Kentucky. While Master Longfellow 
was dreaming in Bering Woods, and learning many 
tongues at Brunswick, a fellow-poet, who was about 
twelve years his elder, was wandering in the groves 
of Berkshire, and, later, was studying the law at 
Great Barrington and Plymouth. The blood of John 
Alden ran in the veins of both. Mr. William Cullen 
Bryant is the greatest poet, it seems to me, that has 
yet appeared in the New World. If there be a great- 
er it is tlie man who now lies in his coffin at Concord, 
whose genius was equal to that of Mr. Bryant, but 
whose art never to the last put on the toga mrilis. 
Henry Wadsworth studied books ; William Cullen 
studied Nature. There was not a flower in his fa- 
ther's garden, not a blade of grass in his fields, not 
a water-course in his neighborhood, that did not 
sparkle, and wave, and bloom in his imagination. He 
immortalized the yellow violet, as it peeped up mod- 
estly from the beechen buds ; he contained the twi- 
light flight of the water-fowl ; he interpreted the 
mysterious secret of the forests, and hills, and hea- 
vens — the universality of Death. No young man 
ever chanted so grand an anthem as " Thanatopsis," 
which carried his fame about the earth while the 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 15 

down of manhood was light upon his cheek. And in 
the summer of the year in which Henry Wadsworth 
went to Bowdoin he delivered before the young gen- 
tlemen who composed the society of the Phi Beta 
Kappa at Harvard the stateliest poem that was ever 
delivered. It will reach its address — " The Ages." 

The modern poet labors under a disadvantage 
which did not attach to his predecessors. He can- 
not saunter up and down the world chanting his pre- 
pared impromptus, as the troubadoi-s and minne- 
singers did, stopi3ing at one court after another, and 
entrancing kings and queens, lords and ladies, 
knights, squires, pages, Avith strains of minstrelsy 
wedded to the music of lyre and lute. He cannot 
Avander up and down the highways and byeways, 
through crowded city streets and solitary country 
roads, singing aloud, like the larks above him, ro- 
mances of old-time chivalry, ballads of battles lost 
and won, traditions of faithless swains and faithful 
maids, pathetic, homely tragedies of breaking hearts, 
and death. No ; his path has been crossed by the 
shadows of Faust, Caxton, Wynkin de Worde — pro- 
fessors of the Black Art. He must have a printer ! 

Without entering upon American Literature, which 
is too large to be traversed by a Medley like this, and 
without attempting the Life of Bryant, which Mr. 
Parke Godwin has nearly finished, I believe, the 



i6 HEXRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

reader of what immediately follows will be good 
enough to conceive the condition of our letters half a 
century ago, and imagine himself at Brunswick and 
in Berkshire. There is no occasion for him to im- 
agine or conceive the United States Literary Ga- 
zette, for copies of that periodical are doubtless to 
be found in most public libraries. It w^as projected 
and published by Mr. Theophilus Parsons, of Boston 
— a graduate of Harvard, a lawyer, afterwards a theo- 
logical w^riter, and a judge. If he be still living — and 
I have no recollection of his decease— Judge Parsons 
has almost comi)leted his eighty-fifth year. The 
United States Literary Gazette, a quarto sheet about 
the size of the London Attienceum, was published 
every two weeks. If my memory of it is to be de- 
pended upon, it began appropriately on April 1, 
1824. At any rate, Mr. Bryant's first contribution to 
it was printed in the number which bears that date. 
It was the Hebrew study, " Eizpali," and it was suc- 
ceeded by other studies in rapid succession — so rapid, 
indeed, that in eleven months they reached the num- 
ber of tw^enty-one different poems, in various mea- 
sures, amounting to over one thousand lines. This 
would not have been many for a poet like ]\Ir. Bryant 
to produce in that time, if literature had been his 
profession. But it w^as not. He was a lawyer in 
good practice in his native county ; he was also a new- 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 17 

ly married man. Mr. Longfellow's contributions to 
the Literary Gazette began on November 15, 1824, and 
ended on November 15, 1825, There were sixteen of 
them, and they covered the space of a twelvemonth. 
It would not be fair to compare the poems of the two 
poets, remembering the difference between their 
ages, but it is curious to contrast them ; for the con- 
trast brings out as nothing else could do the marked 
characteristics of each, and the intellectual superior- 
ity of Mr. Bryant, who was always imaginative, while 
Mr. Longfellow never was so until time had brushed 
away the efflorescence of his fancy, and matured his 
indolent, easy-going judgment. Mr. Bryant strode 
along like the giant he was, leaving "Rizpah " to at- 
tend "The Old Mans Funeral" on April 15, and 
passing from that solemnity to pursue " The Rivu- 
let " on May 15. He turned his back upon "March" 
on June 1, and related "An Indian Story" on 
July 1. Then he floated away to "Summer 
Wind" on July 16, and was "An Indian at the 
Burial-place of his Fathers" on August 1. He 
sang the "Hymn of the Waldenses" on September 
1, and meditated upon "Monument Mountain" on 
September 15. He found himself "After a Tem- 
pest" on October 1, and was dreaming in "Au- 
tumn Woods "on October 15. The "Song of the 
Greek Amazon ' ' fired his heart on December 1 ; he 



1 8 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

tracked "The Murdered Traveller" on January 1 
(1825) ; became the chapel-master of the heavens in 
his "Hymn to the ISTorth Star" on January 15; 
I)ursued and reached "The Lapse of Time" on Feb- 
ruary 15; and broke into jubilance on the 1st of 
March with his " Song of the Stars." As I shall re- 
print in their i)roi3er place all the early poems of Mr. 
Longfellow, with the exception of those which he 
preserved in "Voices of the Night," fourteen years 
later, I will only say here that when Mr. Bryant, 
on I^ovember 15, was musing on "Mutation" and 
"ISTovember," he was deex^ in "Thanksgiving" ; that 
when Mr. Bryant was penning his beautiful ad- 
dress "To a Cloud" he was painting "Italian 
Scenery" ; that when Mr. Bryant discovered "The 
Murdered Traveller" he Avas caring for "The Lu- 
natic Girl" ; and that when Mr. Bryant was chant- 
ing his magnificent "Hymn to the North Star" he 
was carolling about "The Venetian Gondolier." 
The contrast between Master and Scholar was strik- 
ing and instructive. 

Mr. Richard Heme Shepherd, the bibliographer of 
Tennyson, Ruskin, and Carlyle, collected from the 
columns of the Literary Gazette the early jDoems of 
Mr. Longfellow, and reprinted them in 1877 through 
the time-honored house of Pickering. He was under 
the impression that they had not been collected be- 



HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 19 



fore, but he was mistaken, Tliey were included in a 
volume of "Miscellaneous Poems," selected from 
the Literary Gazette^ and published in Boston in 
1826. Here are the firstlings of Mr. Longfellow in 
their original order and chronology : 

THANKSGIVING. 

When first in ancient time, from JubaPs tongue 
The tuneful anthem fill'd the morning air, 
To sacred hymnings and eljsian song 
His music-breathing shell the minstrel woke, 
Devotion breath'd aloud from every chord : 
The voice of jiraise was heai'd in every tone, 
And prayer, and thanks to Him the eternal one — 
To Him that with bright inspiration touch'd 
The high and gifted lyre of heavenly song, 
And warm'd the soul with new vitality. 
A stirring energy through Nature breath'd: 
The voice of adoration from her broke. 
Swelling aloud in every breeze, and heard 
Long in the sullen waterfall — what time 
Soft Spring or hoary Avitumn threw on earth 
Its bloom or blighting — Avhen the Summer smil'd, 
Or Winter o'er the year's sepulchre mourned. 
The Deity was there ! — a nameless sijirit 
Mov'd in the breasts of men to do Him homage; 
And when the morning smil'd, or evening pale 
Hung weeping o'er the melancholy urn, 
They came beneath the broad, o'erarching trees. 
And in their tremulous shadow worshipp'd oft 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

Where pale the vine clung round then* simple altars, 
And gray moss mantling hung. Above was heard 
The melody of winds, breath'd out as the green trees 
Bow'd to their quivering touch in living beauty, . 
And birds sang forth their cheerful hymns. Below 
The bright and widely wandering rivulet 
Struggl'd and gush'd amongst the tangled roots 
That chok'd its I'Bedy fountain, and dark rocks 
Worn smooth by the constant cura-ent. Even there 
The listless wave, that stole with mellow voice 
Where reeds grew rank on the rushy- fring'd brink, 
And the green sedge bent to the wandering wind. 
Sang with a cheerful song of sweet tranquillity. 
Men felt the heavenly influence, and it stole 
Like balm into their hearts till all was peace ; 
And even the air they breath'd — the light they saw^ 
Became religion, for the ethereal spirit 
That to soft music wakes the chords of feeling. 
And mellows everything to beauty, mov'd 
With cheering energy within their breasts, • 
And made all holy there — for all was love. 
The morning stars, that sweetly sang together; 
The moon, that hung at night in the mid-sky ; 
Dayspring, and eventide, and all the fair 
And beautiful forms of Nature, had a voice 
Of eloquent worship. Ocean with its tides 
Swelling and deep, where low the infant storm 
Hung on his dun, dark cloud, and heavily beat 
The pulses of the sea, sent forth a voice 
Of awful adoration to the Spirit 
That, wrapt in darkness, mov'd upon its face. 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 



And when the bow of evening arched the east, 

Or, in the moonlight pale, the curling wave 

Kiss'd with a sweet embrace the sea-worn beach, 

And soft the song of winds came o'er the waters, 

The mingled melody of wind and wave 

Touch'd like a heavenly anthem on the ear ; 

For it arose a tuneful hymn of worship. 

And have our hearts grown cold ? Are there on earth 

No pure reflections caught from heavenly light ? 

Have our mute lips no hymn, our souls no song ? 

Let him that in the summei* day of youth 

Keeps pure the holy fount of youthful feeling. 

And him that in the nightfall of his years 

Lies down in his last sleep, and shuts in peace 

His dim, pale eyes on life's short wayfaring. 

Praise Him that rules the destiny of man. 

Sunday Evening, October, 1824. 



AUTUMNAL NIGHTFALL. 

Round Autumn's mouldermg urn 
Loud mourns the chill and cheerless gale. 
When nightfall shades the quiet vale, 

And stars in beauty burn. 

'Tis the year's eventide. 
The wind, like one that sighs in pain 
O'er joys that ne'er will bloom again. 

Mourns on the far hillside. 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

And yet my pensive eye 
Rests on the faint blue mountain long, 
And for the fairy-land of song, 

That lies beyond, I sigh. 

The moon unveils her brow; 
In the mid-sky her urn glows bright, 
And in her sad and mellowing light 

The valley sleeps below. 

Upon the hazel gray 
The lyre of Autumn hangs unstrung. 
And o'er its tremulous chords are flung 

The fringes of decay. 

I stand deep musing here, 
Beneath the dark and motionless beech, 
Whilst wandering winds of nightfall reach 

My melancholy ear. 

The air breathes chill and free ; 
A Spii'it in soft music calls 
From Autumn's gray and moss-grown halls, 

And round her withered tree. 

The hoar and mantled oak, 
With moss and twisted ivy brown. 
Bends in its lifeless beauty down 

Where weeds the fountain choke. 

That fountain's hollow voice 
Echoes the sound of precious things — 
Of early feeling's tuneful springs 

Chok'd with our blighted joys. 



HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 23 

Leaves, that the night-wind bears 
To earth's cold bosom with a sigh, 
Are types of our mortality. 

And of our fading years. 

The tree that shades the plain, 
Wasting and hoar as time decays, 
Spring shall renew with cheerful days — 

But not my joys again. 
December 1. 



ITALIAN SCENERY. 
Night rests in beauty on Mont Alto. 
Beneath its shade the beauteous Arno sleeps 
In Vallombrosa's bosom, and dark trees 
Bend with a calm and quiet shadow down 
Upon the beauty of that silent river. 
Still in the west a melancholy smile 
Mantles the lips of day, and twilight pale 
Moves like a spectre in the dusky sky ; 
While eve's sweet star on the fast-fading year 
Smiles calmly. Music steals at intervals 
Across the water, with a tremulous swell, 
From out the upland dingle of tall firs. 
And a faint footfall sounds where dim and dark 
Hangs the gray willow fi-om the river's brink, 
O'ershadowing its current. Slowly there 
The lover's gondola drops down tlie stream, 
Silent, save when its dipping oar is heard 
Or in its eddy sighs the rippling wave. 



24 HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 

Mouldering and moss-grown, through the lapse of years, 

In motionless beauty stands the giant oak, 

Whilst those that saw its green and flourishing youth 

Are gone and are forgotten. Soft the fount, 

Whose secret springs the starlight pale discloses, 

Gushes in hollow music, and beyond 

The broader river sweeps its silent way, 

Mingling a silver current with that sea 

Whose waters have no tides, coming nor going. 

On noiseless wing along that fair blue sea 

The halcyon flits ; and where the wearied storm 

Left a loud moaning, all is peace again. 

A calm is on the deep ! The winds that came 
O'er the dark sea-surge with a tremulous breathing, 
And mourn'd on the dark cliff where weeds grew rank, 
And to the autumnal death-dirge the deep sea 
Heaved its long billows — with a cheerless song 
Have pass'd away to the cold earth again. 
Like a wayfaring mourner. Silently 
Up from the calm sea's dim and distant verge, 
Full and unveil'd, the moon's broad disk emerges. 
On Tivoli, and where the fairy hues 
Of Autumn glow upon Abruzzi's woods, 
The silver light is spreading. Far above, 
Encompass'd with their thin, cold atmosphere, 
The Apennmes uplift their snowy brows. 
Glowing with colder beauty, w^here unheard 
The eagle screams in the fathomless ether. 
And stays his Avearied Aving. Here let us pause ! 
The spirit of these soHtudes — the soul 



HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 25 



That dwells within these steep and difficult places — 

Speaks a mysterious language to mine own, 

And brings unutterable musings. Earth 

Sleeps in the shades of nightfall, and the sea 

Spreads like a thin blue haze beneath my feet. 

Whilst the gray columns and the mouldering tombs 

Of the Imperial City, hidden deep 

Beneath the mantle of their shadows, rest. 

My spirit looks on earth ! A heavenly voice 

Comes silently : " Dreamer, is earth thy dwelling ? 

Lo ! nurs'd within that fair and fruitful bosom 

Which has sustain'd thy being, and within 

The colder breast of Ocean, lie the germs 

Of thine own dissolution ! E'en the air. 

That fans the clear blue sky and gives thee strength— 

Up from the sullen lake of mouldering reeds. 

And the wide waste of forest, where the osier 

Thrives in the damj) and motionless atmosphere — 

Shall bring the dire and wasting pestilence 

And blight thy cheek. Dream thou of higher things ; 

This world is not thy home ! " And yet my eye 

Rests upon earth again ! How beautiful. 

Where wild Velino heaves its sullen waves 

Down the high cliff of gray and shapeless granite. 

Hung on the curling mist, the moonlight bow 

Arches the perilous river! A soft light 

Silvers the Albanian mountains, and the haze 

That rests upon their summits mellows down 

The austerer features of their beauty. Faint 

And dim-discover'd glow the Sabine Hills, 

And, listening to the sea's monotonous shell, 



26 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

High on the cliflPs of Terracina stands 
The castle of the Royal Goth * m ruins. 

But night is in her wane ; day's early flush 
Glows like a hectic on her fading cheek, 
Wasting its beauty. And the opening dawn 
With cheerful lustre lights the royal city, 
Wliere with its proud tiara of dark towers 
It sleeps upon its own I'omantic bay. 

Decembek 15. 



THE LUNATIC GIRL. 

Most beautiful, most gentle ! Yet how lost 

To all that gladdens the fair eai-th ; the eye 

That watch'd her being ; the maternal care 

That kept and nourished her ; and the calm light 

That steals from our own thoughts, and softly rests 

On youth's green valleys and smooth-sliding waters. 

Alas ! few suns of life, and fewer winds. 

Had wither'd or had wasted the fresh rose 

That bloom'd upon her cheek ; but one chill frost 

Came in that early autumn, when ripe thought 

Is rich and beautiful, and blighted it ; 

And the fair stock grew languid day by day. 

And droop'd, and droop'd, and shed its many leaves. 

'Tis said that some have died of love, and some. 

That once from beauty's high romance had caught 

Love's passionate feelings and heart-wasting cares, 

* Theodorlc. 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 27 

Have spurn'd life's threshold with a desperate foot ; 

And others have gone mad — and she was one ! 

Her lover died at sea ! and they had felt 

A coldness for each other when they parted ; 

But love return'd again, and to her ear 

Came tidings that the ship which bore her lover 

Had suddenly gone down at sea, and all were lost. 

I saw her in her native vale, when high 

The aspiring lark up from the reedy river 

Mounted on cheerful pinion ; and she sat 

Casting smooth pebbles into a clear fountain, 

And marking how they sunk ; and oft she sigh'd 

For him that perish'd thus in the vast deep. 

She had a sea-shell that her lover brought 

Fi'om the far-distant ocean, and she pressed 

Its smooth, cold lips unto her ear, and thought 

It whisper'd tidings of the dark blue sea ; 

And, sad, she cried: " The tides are out! and now 

I see his coi'se upon the stormy beach ! " 

Around her neck a string of rose-lipp'd shells, 

And coral, and white pearl was loosely hung, 

And close beside her lay a delicate fan. 

Made of the halcyon's blue wing ; and when 

She look'd upon it, it would calm her thoughts 

As that bird calms the ocean — for it gave 

Mournful yet i)leasant memory. Once I mark'd. 

When through the mountain hollows and green woods, 

That bent beneath its footstei^s, the loud wij:id 

Came with a voice as of the restless deep, 

She raised her head, and on her pale, cold cheek 

A beauty of diviner seeming came : 



28 HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 

And then she spread her hands, and smil'd, as if 

She welcom'd a long-absent friend — and then 

Shrunk timorously back again, and wept. 

I tui'n'd away : a multitude of thoughts. 

Mournful and dark, were crowding on my mind, 

And as I left that lost and ruin'd one — 

A living monument that still on earth 

There is warm love and deep sincerity— 

She gazed upon the west, where the blue sky 

Held, like an ocean, in its wide embrace 

Those fairy islands of bright cloud, that lay 

So calm and quietly in the thin ether. 

And then she jJointed where, alone and high, 

One little cloud sail'd onward, like a lost 

And wandering bark, and fauiter grew, and fainter, 

And soon was swallow'd up in the blue depths. 

And when it sunk away she turn'd again 

With sad despondency and tears to earth. 

Three long and weary months — yet not a whisper 
Of stern reproach for that cold parting ! Then 
She sat no longer by her favorite fountain ! 
She was at rest for ever. 

Jauuaky 1, 1825. 



THE VENETIAN GONDOLIEE. 

Here rest the weary oar ! — soft airs 
' Breathe out in the overarching sky ; 

And Night ! — sweet Night — serenely wears 
A smile of peace ; her noon is nigh. 



HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 29 

Where the tall fir in quiet stands, 

And waves, embracing the chaste shores, 

Move o'er sea-shells and bright sands, 
Is heard the sound of dipping oars. 

Swift o'er the wave the light bark springs ; 

Love's midnight hour draws lingering near: 
And list ! his tuneful viol strings 

The young Venetian Gondolier. 

Lo! on the silver- mirror'd deep, 

On earth and her embosom 'd lakes. 
And where the silent rivers sweep, 

From the thin cloud fair moonlight breaks. 

Soft music breathes around, and dies 

On tiie calm bosom of the sea ; 
Whilst in her cell the novice sighs 

Her vespers to her rosary. 

At their dim altars bow fair forms. 

In tender charity for those 
That, helpless left to life's rude storms, 

Have never found this calm repose. 

The bell swings to its midnight chime, 

Reliev'd against the deep blue sky ! 
Haste ! dip the oar again ! 'tis time 

To seek Genevra's balcony. 
Januaey 15. 



30 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

DIRGE OVER A NAMELESS GRAVE. 

By yon still river, where the wave 
Is winding slow at evening's close, 

The beech, upon a nameless grave. 
Its sadly-moving shadow throws. 

O'er the fair woods the sun looks down 
Upon the many-twinkling leaves. 

And twilight's mellow shades are broA\Ti, 
Where darkly the green turf upheaves. 

The river glides in silence there, 
And hardly waves the saplmg tree ; 

Sweet flowers are springing, and the air 
Is full of balm— but where is she! 

They bade her wed a son of pride. 

And leave the hopes she cherish'd long: 

She loved but one, and would not hide 
A love which knew no wrong. 

And months went sadly on — and years : 
And she was wasting day by day 

At length she died, and many tears 
Were shed that she should pass away. 

Then came a gi'ay old man, and knelt 
With bitter weej)ing by her tomb : 

And others mourn'd for him, who felt 
That he had seal'd a daughter's doom. 



HENR Y WADS IVOR TH L ONGFELL IV. 31 

The funeral train has long passed on, 
And time wiped dry the father's tear ! 

Farewell, lost maiden ! There is one 
That mourns thee yet— and he is here. 
Maech 15. 



A SONG OF SAVOY. 

As the dim twilight shrouds 
The mountain's jiurple crest, 

And Summer's white and folded clouds 
Are glowing in the west, 

Loud shouts come up the rocky dell, 

And voices hail the evening-bell. 

Faint is the goatherd's song, 
And sighing comes the breeze : 

The silent river sweeps along 
Amid its beixling trees — 

And the full moon shines faintly there, 

And music fills the evening air. 

Beneath the wa,ving firs 
The tinkling cymbals sound ; 

And as the wind the foliage stirs, 
I feel the dancers bound 

Where the gi'een branches arch'd above 

Bend over this fair scene of love. 



32 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

And he is there that sought 
My young heart long ago ! 

But he has left me, though I thought 
He ne'er could leave me so. 

Ah ! lovers' vows — ^liow frail are they ! 

And his — were made hut yesterday. 

Why comes he not ? I call 

In tears upon him yet ; 
'Twere better ne'er to love at all 

Than love and then forget ! 
Why comes he not ? Alas ! I should 
Reclaim him still, if weeping could. 

But see ! he leaves the glade 

And beckons me away : 
He comes to seek his mountain maid ! 

I cannot chide his stay. 
Glad sounds along the valley swell, 
And voices hail the evening-bell. 
March 15. 



THE INDIAN HUNTER. 

When the Summer harvest was gather'd in, 
And the sheaf of the gleaner grew white and thin, 
And the ploughshare was in its fuiTOw left 
Where the stubble land had been lately cleft, 
An Indian hunter, with unstrung bow, 
Look'd down where the valley lay stretch'd below. 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 2>l 

He was a stranger there, and all that clay 
Had been out on the hills, a perilous way ; 
But the foot of the deer was far and fleet, 
And the wolf kept aloof from the hunter's feet, 
And bitter feelings pass'd o'er him then 
As he stood by the populous haunts of men. 

The winds of Autumn came over the woods 
As the sun stole out from then* solitudes. 
The moss was white on the maple's trunk, 
And dead from its arms the pale vine shrunk, 
And ripen'd the mellow fruit hung, and red 
Were the tree's wither'd leaves round it shed. 

The foot of the reaper moved slow on the lawn, 
And the sickle cut down the yellow coi'n ; 
The mower sung loud by the meadow-side. 
Where the mists of evening were spreading wide, 
And the voice of the herdsman came up the lea. 
And the dance went round by the greenwood ti'ee. 

Then the hunter turu'd away from that scene. 
Where the home of his fathers once had been. 
And lieard, by the distant and measur'd stroke, 
That the woodman hew'd down the giant oak, 
And burning thoughts flash'd over his mind 
Of the white man's faith, and love unkind. 

The moon of the harvest grew high and bright, 
As her golden horn pierc'd the cloud of white ; 
A footstep was heard in the rustling brake, 



34 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

Where the beech overshadovv'd the misty lake, 
And a mourning' voice, and a ])lung'e from shore; 
And the hunter was seen on the hills no more. 

Wlion years had ])ass'd on, by that still lakeside 
The li.sher look'd down through the silver tide, 
And tlici'c, on the smooth yellow sand display'd, 
A skeleton, wasted and white, was laid ; 
And 'twas seen, as the waters moved deep and slow, 
That the hand was still grasping a hunter's bow. 
May 15. 



JECKOYVA. 



Tho Indian cliiof Joclcoyva, as Iriulition says, porishod alono on the moun- 
tain whiiili now b(wu'H iiis nanio. Might overtook liiui wliilMt liunting among the 
clifls, and Im was not li(>ard of till aftor a \o\\^ time, when liis Ualf-dccayod corpse 
was loiind at tlio foot of a liisli rock, over which he must have liiUou. Mount 
Jockoyva is near tlio VVliito Jlills. 

TiiEY made the warrior's grave beside 
The dashing of his native tide: 
And there was mourning in the glen — 
The strong wail of a thousand men — 

O'er him thus fallen in his pride, 
Ere mist of age, or blight, or blast 
Had o'er his mighty spirit pass'd. 

They made the warrior's grave beneath 
The bending of the wild elm's wreath, 
When tho dark hunter's piercing eye 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 35 



Had found that mountain rest on high, 

Where, scattered by the sharp wind's breath, 
Beneath the rug-{^ed cliff were thrown 
The strong belt and the mouldering bone. 

Where was the warrior's foot when fii'st 
The red sun on the mountain burst ? 
Where, when the sultry noontime came 
On the green vales with scorching flame, 

And made the woodlands faint with thirst ? 
'Twas where the wind is keen and loud. 
And the gray eagle breasts the cloud. 

Where was the warrior's foot when night 
Veil'd in thick cloud the mountain-height ? 
None heard the loud and sudden crash, 
None saw the fallen warrior dash 

Down the bare ror;k so high and white! 
But he that droop'd not in the chase 
Made on the hills his burial-place. 

They found him there, when the long day 
Of cold desertion pass'd away. 
And traces on that barren cleft 
Of struggling liard with death were left— 
Deep marks and footprints in the clay! 
And they have laid this feathery helm 
By the dark river and green elm. 



AtJGCBT 1. 



36 HENRY IV ADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 



THE SEA-DIVER. 

My way is on the bright blue sea, 
My sleep upon its rocking tide ; 

And many an eye has follow'd me 
Where billows clasp the worn seaside. 

My plumage bears the crimson blush 
When ocean by the sea is kiss'd ! 

When fades the evening's purple flush, 
My dark wing cleaves the silver mist. 

Full many a fathom down beneath 
The bright arch of the splendid deep 

My ear has heard the sea-shell breathe 
O'er living myriads in their sleep. 

They rested by the coral throne 

And by the pearly diadem, 
Where the jpale sea-grajDe had o'ergrown 

The glorious dwellings made for them. 

At night upon my storm-drench'd wing 
I pois'd above a helmless bark, 

And soon I saw the shatter'd thing 
Had pass'd away and left no mark. 

And when the wind and storm were done, 
A ship, that had rode out the gale. 

Sunk down, without a signal-gun, 
And none was left to tell the tale. 



HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 37 

I saw the pomp of day depart, 

The cloud resign its golden crown, 
When to the ocean's beating heart 

The sailor's wasted course went down. 

Peace be to those whose graves are made 

Beneath the bright and silver sea ! 
Peace, that their relics there were laid 

With no vain pride and pageantry. 
August 15. 



MUSINGS. 



I SAT by my wmdow one night, 

And watch'd how the stars grew high ; 

And the earth and skies were a splendid sight 
To a sober and musing eye. 

From heaven the silver moon shone down 

With gentle and mellow ray. 
And beneath the crowded roofs of the town 

In broad light and shadow lay. 

A glory was on the silent sea. 

And mainland and island too. 
Till a haze came over the lowland lea 

And shrouded that beautiful blue. 

Bright in the moon the Autumn wood 

Its crimson scarf unroll'd, 
And the trees like a splendid army stood 

In a panoply of gold ! 



38 HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 

I saw them waving their banners high, 
As their crests to the night wind how'd, 

And a distant sound on the air went by, 
Like the whispering of a crowd. 

Then I watch'd from my window how fast 
The lights all around me fled. 

As the wearied man to his slumber pass'd, 
And the sick one to his bed. 

All faded save one, that burn'd 
With distant and steady light ; 

But that, too, went out — and I turn'd 
Where my own lamp within shone bright I 

Thus, thought I, our joys must die ; 

Yes, the brightest from earth we win : 
Till each turns away, with a sigh. 

To the lamp that burns brightly within. 

NOVEMBEE 15 



SONG. 

Where, from the eye of day, 

The dark and silent river 
Pursues through tangled woods a way 

O'er which the tall trees quiver ; 

The silver mist, that breaks 
From out that woodland cover, 

Betrays the hidden path it takes, 
And hangs the current over ! 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 39 

So oft the thoughts that burst 

From hidden springs of feehng, 
Like silent streams, unseen at first, 

Fx'om our cold hearts are stealing ; 

But soon the clouds that veil 

The eye of Love, when glowing, 
Betray the long-unwhispered tale 
Of thoughts in darkness flowing ! 
April 1, 1826. 

The poems excluded from those that we have 
printed, and from the list that we have given, but in- 
cluded in "Voices of the Mght," are "Woods in 
Winter" (February 1, 1825), "An April Day" 
(April 15), "Hymn of the Moravian Nuns" (June 
1), " Sunrise on the Hills" (July 1), and "Autumn" 
(October 1). The i:)oetry of the Literary Gazette 
(Mr. Godwin informs me) attracted so much atten- 
tion that when the collection of which I have spoken 
api)eared the North American Reinew thought the 
publication of it a signal event in the history of our 
letters. Mr. Bryant was of the same opinion, for in 
noticing it afterwards in the New York Memew, of 
which he was editor, he remarked : ' ' We do not 
know, of all the numerous English periodical works, 
any one that has furnished within the same time as 
much really beautiful poetry. We might cite in 
proof of this the ' April Day,' the ' Hymn of the 



40 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

Moravian Nuns," and the 'Sunrise on the Hills,' 
by H. W. L. (we know not who he is), or more par> 
ticularly those exquisite morceaux, ' True Grreatness,' 
'The Soul of Song,' 'The Graves of the Patriots,' 
and 'The Desolate City,' by P., whom it would be 
affectation not to recognize as Dr. Percival." I have 
read the four poems by Dr. Percival, and I see little 
or nothing in them, excejit a determination to surpass 
Camj)bell in brevity, and soar away from him on the 
pinions of inflated rhetoric. Such a query as this 
concerning the Soul of Song is certainly not to be 
hastily answered : 

"Loves it the gay saloon, 
"Where "vviue and dances steal away the night, 

And bright as summer noon 
Burns round the pictured walls a blaze of light ? " 

Dr. Percival was nearly twelve years older than ]\Ir. 
Longfellow ; he was a century younger in practical 
knowledge of poetry — one of those scholarly men of 
genius who disappoint everybody, themselves most of 
all. The estimation in which Mr. Longfellow' s early 
verse was held was well stated by his college friend, 
Mr. Cheever, who, five years later than the publica- 
tion of the volume si)ecified above, compiled a mis- 
cellaneous medley of melodies of home manufacture, 
which he unthinkingly entitled ' ' The Commonplace 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 41 

Book of American Poetry," and whicli Mr. Poe un- 
feelingly declared had at least the merit of not belying 
its title, for it was exceedingly commonplace. Mr. 
Clieever included seven of Mr. Longfellow's poems 
therein, and subjoined to the last the following note : 
"Most of Mr. Longfellow's poetry — indeed, we be- 
lieve nearly all that has been published — appeared 
during his college life in the United States Literary 
Gazette. It displays a very refined taste, and a very 
pure vein of poetical feeling. It possesses what has 
been a rare quality in the American poets — simi^li- 
city of expression, without any attemi)t to startle 
the reader, or to produce an effect by far- sought epi- 
thets. There is much sweetness in his imagery and 
language ; and sometimes he is hardly excelled by 
any one for the quiet accuracy exhibited in his pic- 
tures of natural objects. His poetry will not easily 
be forgotten ; some of it will be remembered with 
that of Dana and Bryant." 

The year in which Mr. Cheever published his Com- 
moniDlace Book was an eventful year for American 
Song. Mr. William CuUen Bryant published his 
second collection of Poems, and Mr, Edgar Allan Poe 
published his second (or third) collection of Poems, 
both in New York, in the same year, and through 
the same publisher, Elam Bliss. Mr. Bryant was the 
editor of the Evening Post; Mr. Poe was the editor 



42 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

of nothing. He had just been expelled from West 
Point by conrt-martial, charged with gross neglect 
of all duties, and disobedience of orders, and was 
tinkering over his old verses (perhaps in New York), 
and receiving subscriptions of two dollars and fifty 
cents for his x^rojected opuscule from his whilom 
fellow-cadets. What he thought of the Cheer>er- 
Literary Gazette Poets may easily be divined. "I 
never heard him sj^eak in terms of praise of any 
English writer, living or dead," was the bitter testi- 
mony of one who knew him at this time. Every 
other man was a x)lagiarist; lie was original. 

The eminence of Mr. Bryant was seen in the influ- 
ence that he exercised over his contemporaries, and 
over his intellectual son, Mr. Longfellow. Mr. Bry- 
ant' s well-head of inspiration was Nature ; the ear- 
liest fountains from which he drank were the La- 
tin and Greek classics ; after these Pope, Dryden, 
Gray, Collins, Cowper, Wordsworth. The spirit 
that sparkled in their lucid waters quenched and 
increased his thirst. His first American masters 
were Timothy Dwiglit and Philip Freneau — DMght 
in "Greenfield Hill," particularly in the third part 
of that rustic epic, which is devoted to the destruc- 
tion of the Pequods, and Freneau in such poems as 
"The Dying Indian," and "The Indian Burying- 
Ground." Mr. Bryant's first scholars in nature-wor- 



HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 43 

sliip and in aboriginal lore were Miss Lydia Huntley, 
Mr. John Gardiner Calkins Brainard, Mr. Carlos 
Wilcox, and Mr. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 
There was a clever monitor and a sprightly moni- 
tress in the school to which Mr. Longfellow went, 
and from them he derived much of his second-hand 
knowledge. One was his old school-fellow, Nathan- 
iel Parker Willis ; the other was a young English gen- 
tlewoman, of Irish and Italian descent, who was 
penning Welsh melodies at Bronwylfa, Miss Feli- 
cea Dorothea Browne. Her sensitive genius is felt 
in "An April Day" as surely as the influence of 
Willis, heightened by the strength of Bryant, is felt 
in "Autumn" and "The Spirit of Poetry." It is 
impossible not to recognize Willis in lines like these : 

' ' It fills the nice and delicate ear of thought, 
When the fast-ushering star of morning comes 
O'er- riding the gray hills with golden scarf." 

There is mere millinery. Bryant overshadows every- 
thing. His "March" is repeated in "Woods in 
Winter." The testimony of any stanza of the last 
is convincing. Take the first : 

" When winter wiuds are piercing chill, 

And through the hawthorn blows the gale, 
With solemn feet I tread the hill 
That overbrows the lonely vale." 



44 HENR Y WADS WOR TH L ONGFELL JV. 

And what but the close of " Thanatopsis " can have 
suggested the close of "Autumn" ? 

" For him the wind, ay, and the yellow leaves, 
Shall have a voice and give him eloquent teachings. 
He shall so hear the solemn hymn that Death 
Has lifted up for all that he shall go 
To his long resting-place without a tear." 

He went to his long resting-place nearly fifty-seven 
years later, with the tears of the world. 

I have not written these last paragraphs with the 
intention of depreciating Mr. Longfellow, or casting 
the shadow of a doubt upon his originality, but 
simply to point out that all poets, small and great 
alike, start by echoing the songs of others. Ho- 
mer's masters, if we could discover them, were old 
rhapsodists. We know the lords paramount of the 
Greek and Roman tragic writers, idyllic pi23ers, bit- 
ing satirists. Chaucer was the child of Petrarcha and 
Boccaccio, Gower of Chaucer, Surrey of the Italian 
sonneteers, ShakesiDeare of Daniel and Marlowe, Mil- 
ton of Du Bartas, Cowley of Spenser, Pope of Dry- 
den, Cowper of Thomson, Burns of Ramsay, Fer- 
guson, and early balladists, Wordsworth of all poets, 
Keats of Chaucer and Spenser, Tennyson of Keats, 
and Longfellow of Bryant. It is an illustrious 
pedigree. 



HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 45 

Graduating with honors in his eighteenth year, to 
the delight of his college friends, Mr. Longfellow be- 
took himself to Portland, and entered the office of his 
father to study the law. But it was not to be, for 
the faculty of Bowdoin thought so highly of their 
poetic scholar that they appointed him Professor of 
Modern Languages and Literature, with the privilege 
of going abroad for three years that he might qualify 
himself for his duties. He accepted — he would have 
been mad not to have accepted, for he was averse from 
the law, and not disposed to become a teacher either 
of wealthy or beautiful pupils ; so in the following- 
year he set sail for Europe. Americans of fifty years 
ago were not so accustomed to travel as their descen- 
dants have grown to be. Now and then one did cross 
the Atlantic billows, and one of the first to go from 
Portland was Mr. John Neal, who had wandered to 
London while Mr. Longfellow was at college, and was 
supporting himself by his pen in BlaclcwdocV s Maga- 
zine and other British periodicals. Him, no doubt, 
Mr. Longfellow met, either at his chambers, or the 
libraries, or in the crowded study of Mr. Jeremy 
Bentham. Mr. Irving he certainly met in 1827. "I 
had parted with him at Paris early in the year," 
writes Mr. Pierre Irving. "His sojourn in Madrid 
had commenced with the 6th of March, Mr. Irving, in 
a letter to me of the 8th, having this mention of him : 



46 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

' Mr, Longfellow arrived safe and cheerily tlie day be- 
fore yesterday, having met with no robbers,' " Mr. 
Pierre Irving then proceeds to i^ay Mr. Longfellow a 
compliment for his beautiful allusion to his distin- 
guished uncle, and quotes a passage from a discourse 
delivered by him before the Massachusetts Histori- 
cal Society, and expressing his admiration for the 
"Sketch-Book," jmblished when he was a school- 
boy. " Many years afterw^ards I had the pleasure of 
meeting Mr. Irving in Spain, and found the author, 
whom I had loved, repeated in the man. The same 
playful humor, the same touch of sentiment, the 
same poetic atmosphere, and, what I admired still 
more, the entire absence of all literary jealousy, of 
all that mean avarice of fame w^hicli counts what is 
given to another as so much taken from one's self — 

" ' And, trembling, hears on every breeze 
The laurels of Miltiades.' 

"At this time Mr. Irving was at Madrid, engaged 
upon his 'Life of Columbus,' and if the work itself 
did not bear ample testimony to his zealous and con- 
scientious labor I could do so from j)ersonal observa- 
tion. He seemed to be always at work. ' Sit down,' 
he would say ; ' I will talk witli you in a moment, but 
I must first finish this sentence.' 

"One summer morning, jjassing his house at the 



HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 47 

early hour of six, I saw liis study already wide open. 
On my mentioning it to liim afterwards lie said : 
' Yes, I am always at my work as early as six.' 
Since then I have often remembered that sunny 
morning and that open window, so suggestive of his 
sunny temperament and his open heart, and equally 
so of his j)atient and persistent toil, and have recalled 
those striking words of Dante : 

' ' ' Seg'gendo in piuma, 
In f ama non si vieii, ne sotto coltre ; 

Senza la qual, chi sua vita consuma, 
Cotal vestigio in terra, cli se.lascia 

Qual fumino in aere el in acqua la scliiuma.' 

' ' ' Seated upon down, 
Or in his bed, man cometh not to fame ; 

Without which, whoso his life consumes, 
Such vestige of himself on earth shall leave 

As smoke in air and in the water foam.' " 

A graceful tribute from a scholar to his dead master. 
A reasonable amount of originality was expected 
of, and demanded from, an American tourist in the 
second quarter of the century. He was not asked to 
entertain but to instruct his readers. He might be 
anything that he could fish uj) from his inkstand — 
whimsical, desultory, pedantic, even a little dull, if 
he must needs be. What was looked for were his 



48 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

impressions, Ms notions about effete aristocracies, 
ideals of bygone time to whicli Ideality was a stran- 
ger. I shall not go here into the itinerary of the tra- 
velling poet further than to say that it was directed 
through England, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, and 
Holland, A ripe scholar and a good one, he returned 
to his duties at Brunswick in 1829. From this date 
begins his fifty-three years' devotion to literature as 
tutor, teacher, lecturer, critic, poet, translator, ma- 
gazinist, and man (rf letters generally — honorable ser- 
vice in a high cause. I hope before I have done to 
trace the bibliography of his work with tolerable ac- 
curacy ; at present I can only speak of the first of 
his works in my own possession. It is a shabby 
12mo of 104 pages, bound in red cloth, and is entitled 
" Syllabus de la Grammaire Italienne, Par H. W. 
Longfellow, Professor de Langues Modernes a Bow- 
doin-CoUege. A 1' Usage de Ceux qui Possedent 
la Langue Frangaise. Boston : Gray et Bowen. 
MDCCCXXXII." It was ushered into the world by 
this Avertissement : "J'ai prepare cet Abrige de la 
Grammaire Italienne, non pour instruire ceux qui 
auraient a parler cette langue, mais pour faciliter les 
progres de ceux, qui voudront I'apprendre a lire. 
Pour atteindre ce but il sufRt d'en avoir expose suc- 
cinctement les principes. II serait superflu de les 
developper dans tons leur etendue. 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 49 



" J'ai emx3loye 1' accent aigu sur presque tons les 
mots Italiens, pour marquer les syllabes sur lesquelles 
il faut appuyer la voix dans ]a prononciation ; mais 
il faut observer que les Italiens ne s'en servent que 
tres rarement, Ou trouvera les regies pour 1' usage 
de r accent aigu dans la traite de 1' Ortliographie ; 
voyez chapitre viii., page 104. H. W. L." 

Of tlie fate of this little pony, whereupon those who 
had mounted it might amble easily from France to 
Italy, I have no knowledge. I dare say it took le 
grand prix^ for it was not liandicai)ped, and was rid- 
den by a jockey of lightweight, behind whom, booted 
and spurred, was not yet riding Black Care. Neither 
were " Yoicks forward.!" and "Ho, Tally-Ho ! " 
among the greetings that saluted it. Gray et Bowen 
were not plungers. 

Future bibliographers will, no doubt, work out the 
succession of Mr. Longfellow's writings, from his 
greatest work — when time shall have determined 
which that is — dow^n to the smallest scrap that X)ro- 
ceeded from his pen. My business now is chiefly 
with his books, and not with his pai3ers in periodi- 
cals — such, for instance, as the North American Re- 
meio, in which, I believe, the earliest of these papers 
was iDublished. His next -book after the "Syllabus 
de la Grammaire Italienne " was a model of scholarly 
and simited translation. Its full title was: "Cop- 



50 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, 

las de Don Jorge Manriqne. Translated from the 
Spanish. Witli an Introductory Essay on the Moral 
and Devotional Poetry of Spain." The name of the 
author follows, and the imprint of "Boston: Al- 
lan and Ticknor, 1833." Of the accuracy of Mr. 
Longfellow's reproduction of the grave and stately 
original I am no adequate judge ; but,, if I may 
trust the impression which it has always made upon 
me, it certainly reflects the moral and devotional 
spirit of Don Jorge Manrique, and his deep though 
temiDerate grief on the death of his father, Roderigo 
Manrique, Conde de Parades and Maestre de Santi- 
ago, who died in 1476, according to Mariana, in the 
town of Ucles, but according to his son, who sur- 
vived him three years, in Ocana. Mr. George Tick- 
nor, the historian of Sx')anish literature, directs our 
attention to the simplicity and directness of its title, 
*' The Stanzas of Manrique," as if it needed no more 
distinctive name. " Nor does it. Instead of being a 
loud exhibition of his sorrows, or, what would have 
been more in the spirit of the age, a conceited ex- 
hibition of his learning, it is a simple and natural 
complaint of the mutability of all earthly happiness ; 
the mere overflowing of a heart filled with despon- 
dency at being suddenly brought to feel the worthless- 
ness of what it has most valued and pursued. His 
father occupies hardly half the canvas of the poem, 



HENRY IVADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 51 

and some of the stanzas devoted more directly to 
liim are the only portion of it we could wish away." 
Mr. Ticknor quotes three stanzas of this solemn dirge 
over mortality, and pronounces Mr. Longfellow's 
translation a beautiful one. It is more than that — 
it is noble and weighty in the lines on the court of 
John II. : 

" Where is the King Don Juan ? Where 
Each royal prince and noble heir 

Of Aragon ? 
Where are the courtly gallantries ? 
The deeds of love and high emprise 

In battle done ? 
Tourney and joust that charm'd the eye, 
And scarf, and gorgeous panoply, 

And nodding jilume : 
What were they but a pageant scene ? 
What but the garlands gay and green 

That deck the tomb ? 

" Where are the high-born dames, and where 
Their gay attire, and jewell'd hair. 

And odors sweet ? 
Where are the gentle knights that came 
To kneel and breathe love's ardent flame 

Low at their feet ? 
Where is the song of Troubadour ? 
Where are the lute and gay tambour 



52 HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 

They loved of yore ? 
Where is the mazy dance of old, 
The flowing robes mwrought with gold 

The dancei's wore ? " 

The little volrnne wliich iisliered this thoughtful 
strain into the world contained besides seven trans- 
lations of Spanish sonnets of no great poetical value. 
When Mr. Longfellow reprinted the collection he 
omitted two which have never reappeared among 
his writings. They are by Francisco de Medrano : 

I. 
AET AND NATURE. 

The works of human artifice soon tire 
The curious eye ; the fountain's sj^arkling rill, 
And gardens, when adorn'd by human skill, 
Reproach the feeble hand, the vain desire. 

But, O the free and wild magnificence 
Of Nature, in her lavish hours, doth steal. 
In admiration silent and intense, 
The soul of him, who hath a soul to feel. 

The river moving on its ceaseless way. 
The verdant reach of meadows fair and green. 
And the blue hills that bound the sylvan scene — 

These speak of grandeur that defies decay; 
Proclaim the Eternal Architect on high, 
Wlio stamps on all his works his own eternity. 



HENRY WADS IVOR TH LONGFELLOW. 53 



THE TWO HARVESTS. 

But yesterday these few and hoary sheaves 
Waved in the golden harvest ; from the plain 
I saw the blade shoot upward, and the grain 
Put forth the unripe ear and tender leaves. 

Then the glad upland smil'd upon the view, 
And to the air the broad green leaves unroll'd, 
A peerless emerald in each silken fold, 
And on each palm, a pearl of morning dew. 

And thus sprang up and ripened in brief space 
All that beneath the reaper's sickle died. 
All that smiled beauteous in the summertide. 

And what are we ? — a copy of that race, 
The later harvest of a longer year ! 
And, O how many fall before the ripened ear. 

A half -hour's glance over the early volumes of the 
KnicJcerhocJcer Magazine has put me upon the lite- 
rary trail of Mr. Longfellow after the publication of 
this volume of Spanish translations. I struck it in 
the number for May, 1834, in the first of a series of 
scattered paragraphs under the general heading of 
"The Blank-Book of a Country Schoolmaster." 
As the reader may like to see one of these para- 
graphs, I will copy the fifth : 

" MIDNIGHT DEVOTIOlSr. 

" If there be one hour more fitted to devotion than 



5 4 HENR Y WA DS WOR TH LONGFELLO W: 

the rest, it is this — the silent, solemn, solitary hour 
of midnight in midwinter. Not a light can be seen in 
the village — the woiid is asleep around me. How 
breathless and how still ! Wot air enough to shake 
down the feathery snow from the branches of the 
trees and the leafless vine at my window. 

" The moon, a Vh'gin Queen, 
Reigns absolute in her celestial city. 
One lonely star, beside the western gate, 
Stands sentinel. All else around the throne 
Submissive veil their faces, for in her 
Reflected shine the majesty and light 
Of her departed lord, the glorious sun. 
The an* itself is awed into a whisper ! 
And yet amid the stillness comes a sound, 
Like the sad music of a muffled drum, 
Distant and indistinct. It is the voice 
Of many waters down the shelving rock 
Falling, still falling through the silent night, 
Fit music for the solemn march of Time. 

Father, who art in heaven ! with contrite heart 
I bow before thee ! Hallowed be thy name ; 
I have fled from thee — but thou hast not cursed me ; 
I have forsaken thee — yet thou hast blessed me ; 
Forgotten thee — yet thou hast loved me still ! " 

This little leaf from the schoolmaster's blank- 
book possesses no intellectual value, though it is 
not without interest as a midnight record of Profes- 
sor Longfellow's life at Bowdoin, and it is very curi- 
ous as containing the germ of a famous stanza in a 
future poem — a stanza which has hitherto been sup- 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 55 

posed to be a mere echo of four lines in tlie deathless 
" Exequy of Bishop King " : 

* But hark! My Pulse like a soft Drum 
Beats my approcli, tells Thee I come ; 
And slow liowere my marches be, 
I shall' at last sit down by T/iee." 

" Ai't is long, and Time is fleeting, 

And our hearts, though stout and brave, 
Still, like muffled drums, are beating 
Funeral mai'ches to the grave." 

The publication in parts of " Salmagundi" in 1807, 
of "The Sketch-Book" in 1819, and of "The Idle 
Man" in 1821, suggested to Mr. Longfellow the pub- 
lication of his observations of travel in 1834. I 
find a notice of the second part of "Outre-Mer," 
Avliich bore the double iminint of Boston and New 
York, in the July number of the Knickerljocker : 
"There is not in our country a writer who so nearly 
approaches the ease and grace of style, the purity 
of sentiment and language, which distinguish the 
'Sketch-Book' and ' Bracebridge. Hall ' as the au- 
thor of 'Outre-Mer.' We remember to have seen 
many years since a touching sketch from his pen, 
which was copied from an English periodical into 
which it had found its way, and circulated widely 
in American journals as the production of Wash- 



56 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

ington Irving. His humor is of the same oblique, 
happy cast, and his i:>athos has the power to awaken 
the same thrilling echoes in the human bosom." The 
kindly writer of this enthusiastic notice was proba- 
bly Mr. Willis Gaylord Clark, who was unques- 
tionably the means of inducing Professor Longfel- 
low to send his prose and verse to the Knickerhocker, 
of which his brother, Mr. Lewis Gaylord Clark, was 
editor. A curious sample of the last, which I think 
has hitherto escaped detection, will be found in tlie 
Knickerbocker for January, 1835. Here it is : 

THE SOUL. 

AN EXTRACT FROM AN UNPUBLISHED POEM. 

And is this education ? This the training 

Of an immortal spirit for the skies ? 
Would you, then, teach it virtue by restraining 

Its heavenward aspirations till it dies ? 
Thus fit it for a life beyond the grave 

By making it a helot and a slave 

To earth-born passions, and unholy lust, 
And grovelling appetites ? Oh ! no. The soul 

Blazoned with shame, and foul with earthly dust 
And for an emblem bearing o'er the whole 

The crafty serpent, not the peaceful dove, 

Has no escutcheon for the courts above. 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 57 

Why, then, prove false to Nature's noblest trust ? 

Wliy, then, restrain the spirit's upward flight, 
And make its dwelling in the loathsome dust, 

Until ' earth's shadow hath eclipsed its light ' ? 
Why deck the flesh, the sensual slave of sin, 
And leave in rags the immortal guest within ? 



Beware ! The Israelite of old who tore 
The lion in his path — when, poor and blind, 

He saw the blessed light of heaven no more, 
Shorn of his nobler strength, and forced to grind 

In prison, and at times led forth to be 

A pander to Philistine I'evelry, 



Destroyed himself, and with him those that made 
A cruel mockery of his sightless eyes ! 

So, too, the immortal soul, when once betrayed 
To minister to lusts it doth despise, 

A poor blind slave, the scoff and jest of all, 

Expires, and thousands perish in the fall ! 

I have not resurrected these dead bones to prove 
that Mr. Longfellow sometimes wrote as indifferently 
as lesser poets, but to point out the beginning of a' 
noble image in the last two stanzas of this abortive, 
unfinished poem. It had a happy ending seven years 
later in "Poems on Slavery." Let me give it here as 
a lesson in the art of revision : 



58 HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW 



THE WARNING. 

Beware ! The Israelite of old, who tore 
The lion iii his path — when, poor and blind, 

He saw the blessed light of heaven no more, 
Shorn of his noble strength, and forced to grind 

In prison, and at last led forth to be 

A i^ander to Philistine revelry, 

Upon the pillars of the temple laid 
His desperate hands, and in its overthrow 

Destroyed himself, and Avith him those who made 
A cruel mockery of his. sightless woe; 

The poor, blind Slave, the scoff and jest of all. 

Expired, and thousands perished in the fall ! 

There is a poor, blind Samson in this land, 

Shorn of his strength, and bound in bonds of steel, 

Who may, in some grim revel, raise his hand, 
And shake the pillars of this Commonweal, 

Till the vast Temple of our liberties 

A shapeless mass of wreck and rubbish lies. 

When "Ontre-Mer," wMcli aiipears to have failed 
when issued in parts, was published in two volumes 
by the Harpers in 1835, the genial critic of the 
KnicTcerhocker remembered not to forget. "The 
author of this work, in our opinion, has a glorious 
career before him. With a mind jDure and simple, 
yet strong and ardent, and stored with learning, he 



HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 59 

writes always as if under the influence of a true in- 
spiration. As a scliolar, especially in liis acquain- 
tance with modern languages, we believe Professor 
Longfellow unequalled by any author of his years in 
America or England. His style, which is peculiarly 
his own, is polished and free, his moral ken is ex- 
quisite, his humor rich without rudeness, and keen 
without asperity. With all the good old English 
writers he is a familiar acquaintance, and, having 
thumbed their black-letter tomes to some purpose, 
he has saturated his mind with their refreshing 
spirit." If the opinion of one who has thumbed 
black-letter tomes, in a limited way, in libraries, and 
who, if he has a familiar acquaintance with any- 
thing, has it with good old English literature, 
should weigh in the scale, this was just what* Mr. 
Longfellow had not done. 

A reasonable estimate of the Longfellow of this 
period was reached by the AtliencBum three years 
later. Here is the gist of it, which I think was from 
the pen of Henry Fothergill Chorley : "This writer 
— not unknown here as the author of ' Outer-Mer ' 
— comes nearer to a literary character than most of 
his associates. A professor of modern tongues in 
Harvard University, it is said ; not of unknown 
tongues, we presume, though we were just about to 
call him an Irvingite. We speak in the literary ac- 



6o HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

ceptation, not theological. We cannot say tliat lie 
imitates the author of the ' Sketch-Book ' ; he has a 
spirit of his own. But it seems to us that his mind 
is much of the same descrii)tioii. He is sprightly, 
and witty, and graphic ; he has seen much of the 
world and used his opportunities well. There is an 
elegant ease in 'his style — finished, but not finical ; 
just the thing, as we say of a private gentleman 
whose manners and dress excite no other remark, 
while they satisfy all who observe them. And with- 
al he has the genial honliomie of Irving. He sees 
the pleasant side of things. He likes that his reader 
should be innocently pleased, and is content if he 
be so. If Longfellow, in a vrord, had come before 
Irving his fame would be that of a founder of a 
school (so far as America is concerned) rather than 
one of the scholars. As it is he may be popular, b«t 
not famous, and will hardly have credit even for 
what he is worth." Before leaving for his Europe- 
an tour Professor Longfellow married a daughter of 
Judge Barrett Potter, of his native town. That is to 
say, as nearly as I can make out, for he may have 
met and married the young lady abroad. The sha- 
dow of his first great sorrow fell upon him at Rotter- 
dam, where she passed suddenly into the world of 
souls, and where, amid the plashing of its sluggish 
waters, her dust is mouldering away. 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 6i 

Let me return to " Outre- Mer" long enough to 
give my early impression of it. It is {ine judice) 
more scholarly than the "Sketch-Book," and the 
style is sweeter and mellower than Irving had yet 
attained ; like Sidney, the writer warbled in poetic 
prose. Among the countries which he visited France 
awakened the deepest interest in him, and partook of 
his tenderest emotion, partly because he was deeply 
read in its literature, and partly because it was opu- 
lent in old-time picturesqueness. We find in the 
ninth chapter, which glances at "The Trouveres," 
the first two of his many French translations. One 
is a song in praise of Spring, by Charles d' Orleans, 
the other a copy of verses upon a sleeping child. 
They are elegantly rendered, but we feel in reading 
them (whether we know French or not) that the 
spirit of their originals has evaded Professor Long- 
fellow, as it evaded Miss Costello, who published in 
the same year a volume of similar mistakes, which 
are redolent of the nineteenth but not of the fifteenth 
century. " Outre-Mer" will always possess a charm 
to the student of American literature as a rare ex- 
ample of a nondescript sort of prose— half narrative, 
half legendary, and wholly poetical— which ranks, 
and ought to rank, among the things which were. It 
will never flourish here again ; but forty years ago 
it surprised and delighted literate and sympathetic 



62 HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 

readers, to whom, and their chiklren after them, it 
unlocked the treasure-house of European travel, and 
flung its jewels about lavishly. It was the Old World 
in the New World, with all its storied rivers and 
mountains, its royal palaces, and parks, and cathe- 
drals, its libraries and picture-galleries, and its 
peoples with their customs and literatures. Quietly 
humorous, prettily pathetic, pensive and imagina- 
tive, sentimental readers w^ere drawn to the tiny 
sketch of ' ' Jacqueline, ' ' humorous readers to ' ' Mar- 
tin Franc and the Monks of St. Anthony " and "The 
Notary of Perigueux," and bookish readers to "The 
Trouveres," "Ancient Spanish Ballads," and "The 
Devotional Poetry," with which the admirers of 
" Coplas de Manrique " were already familiar. Writ- 
ing in May, 1882, I cannot say that "Outre-Mer" is 
a remarkable volume ; but remembering what Ameri- 
can literature was in 1835, I see that it was an im- 
portant book then ; that it fairly won all the praise 
it received ; that it eminently represented the talents 
and tlie genius of its writer ; and that it mapped out 
his future career as if by inspiration. The reputa- 
tion of Professor Longfellow was so assured at this 
time that he was selected by the faculty of Harvard 
University to succeed Mr. George Ticknor, who re- 
signed his professorsliip of modern languages and lit- 
erature. He gave up his chair at Bowdoin, and went 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. ^t, 



abroad again to continue and finish his studies in the 
literature of Northern Euroi^e. A summer in Den- 
mark and Sweden and an autumn and winter in Ger- 
many consumed little more than a year. The death 
of Mrs. Longfellow at Rotterdam arrested his studies 
and his travel until the following spring and summer, 
which were passed in the Tyrol and Switzerland. 
He returned to the United States in November, 1836, 
and entered upon his duties at Harvard. 

I have now completed the circle which started with 
Mr. Longfellow's note of April 20, 1878, and I have 
before me the book to which he there referred. I vio- 
late no confidence when I say that the paper devoted 
to Mr. Longfellow in " Homes of American Authors " 
is from the brilliant and versatile pen of Mr. George 
William Curtis. Mr. Curtis was the life-long friend 
of Mr. Longfellow, and the accuracy of what he 
wrote about him and his surroundings may be de- 
pended upon. I shall use the substance of it in what 
follows, either in his words or my own, as may seem 
best. 

One calm afternoon in the summer of 1837 a young 
gentleman of thirty sauntered from the high-road of 
Cambridge down the elm-shaded walk that led to the 
old Craigie House. Gaining the door, he halted sud- 
denly to study the huge, old-fashioned brass knock- 
er and the quaint handle that bespoke familiarity 



64 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

with tilings Colonial and Revolutionary. These, of 
course, were not withoiit their charm to this travelled 
student, who must have seen the like many times over 
in England and Holland ; but it was not this that de- 
tained him there, let us fancy with his hat uplifted, 
and the wind rippling through his hair. It was not 
antiquity but memory that held him fast — the mem- 
ory of a soldier and a statesman whom the world 
admires and reveres — Washington. Hither he came 
with his army after the lost battle of Bunker Hill — 
stalwart farmers' sons in ragged regimentals, bronzed 
at the plough and in the hay-field, scarred in Indian 
wars, indomitable — and drilling them, along the road, 
and in the green pastures. Harvard students, profes- 
sors of learned tongues and the humane arts, doctors, 
lawyers, and a host of fighting parsons baptized with 
fire at Lexington and Concord. He thought of the 
great Commander. "Had his hand, perhaps, lifted 
this same latch, lingering as he clasped it in a whirl 
of emotions ? Had he, too, paused in the calm sum- 
mer afternoon, and watched the silver gleam of the 
broad river in the meadows, the dreamy blue of the 
Milton hills beyond ? And had the tranquillity of 
that landscajDe penetrated his heart with ' the sleep 
that is among the hills,' and whose fairest dream to 
him was a hope now realized in the peaceful prosper- 
ity of his country ? " 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 65 

"The dreamer upraised the huge brass knocker, 
which fell with a heavy clang, A servant appeared 
as the wide door oi^ened, and invited the visitor to 
enter. He bowed and asked for Mrs. Craigie. The 
door of a little j)arlor was o^oened softly, and that 
lady appeared — a tall, erect figure, crowned with a 
majestic turban, such as our stately grandmothers 
delighted to wear, and calmly surveyed him with keen 
gray eyes. Everything about her bespoke the gen- 
tlewoman of a past generation. To an inquiry of the 
young gentleman, who bent his manliness before her 
widowhood, she gravely answered : ' But I lodge stu- 
dents no longer.' ' But I am not a student ; I am 
a Professor in the University.' 'A Professor?' she 
demanded, with perhaps a shade of incredulity. 
'Professor Longfellow,' he added, thus introducing 
himself. 'Ah ! that is different. I will show you what 
there is.' " What is that which she seems to hear be- 
fore her ? Only the ticking clock, which says : ' ' This 
is the master of the house — the master, master." 
There are spirits about you, Mrs. Craigie. "There- 
uj)on she preceded the Professor up the stairs, and, 
gaining the upper hall, paused at each door, opened it, 
permitted him to perceive its delightful fitness for his 
purpose — kindled expectation to the utmost — then 
quietly closed the door again, observing, ' You can- 
not have that.' It was most Barmecide hospitality. 



66 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

The professorial eyes glanced restlessly around tlie 
fine old-fasliioned points of the mansion, marked the 
wooden carvings, the air of opulent respectability in 
the past — which corresponds in New England to the 
impression of ancient nobility in old England— and 
wondered in which of these pleasant fields of sugges- 
tive association he was to be allowed to pitch his 
tent. The turbaned hostess at length oiDened the door 
of the southeast corner room in the second story, and 
while the guest looked wistfully in, and awaited the 
customary ' You cannot have that,' he was agree- 
ably surprised by a variation of the strain to the ef- 
fect that he might occupy it. The room was upon the 
front of the house, and looked over the meadows to 
the river. It had an atmosphere of fascinating re- 
I)ose, in which the young man was at once domesti- 
cated as in an old home. The elms of the avenue 
shaded his windows, and as he glanced from them 
the summer lay asleep upon the landscape in the 
windless day. 'This,' said the old lady, with a slight 
sadness in her voice, as if speaking of times for ever 
past and to which she herself properly belonged — 
' this was General Washington's chamber ! ' " 

Professor Longfellow was housed as a poet should 
be — in a noble mansion, in the shadows of immemorial 
elms, and in the midst of a pastoral landscape. " Tlie 
traveller upon the high-road before the Craigie House, 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 67 

even if he knew nothing of its story, would be struck 
by its quaint dignity and respectability, and make a 
legend, if he could not find one already made. If, 
however, his lot had been cast in Cambridge, and he 
had been able to secure a room in the mansion, he 
would not rest until he had explored the traditions of 
its origin and occupancy, and had given his fancy 
moulds in which to run its images. He would have 
found in the churchyard of Cambridge a freestone 
tablet, supported by five pillars, upon which, with the 
name Col. John Vassal, died in 1747, are sculptured 
the words Vas-sol and the emblems, a goblet and 
sun. Whether this device was a proud assertion of 
the fact that the fortunes of the family should be al- 
ways as 

'A beaker full of the warm South,' 

happily no historian records ; for the beaker has long 
since been drained to the dregs, and of the stately 
family nothing survived in the early part of the Poet's 
residence in the house but an old black man who had 
been born, a slave, in the mansion during the last days 
of the Vassals, and who occasionally returned to visit 
his earliest haunts, like an Indian the hunting-grounds 
of his extinct tribe. This Col. John Vassal is sup- 
posed to have built the house towards the close of 
the first half of the last century. Upon an iron in 



68 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

the back of one of the chimneys there is the date 
1759, which probably commemorates no more than 
the fact of its own insertion at that period, inas- 
much as the builder of the house would hardly 
commit the authentic witness of its erection to the 
mercies of smoke and soot. History capitulates be- 
fore the exact date of the building of the Craigie 
House as comi^letely as before that of the foundation 
of Thebes. But the house Avas evidently generously 
built, and Col. John Vassal, having lived there in gene- 
rous style, died, and lies under the freestone tablet. 
His son John fell upon revolutionary times, and 
was a royalist. The observer of the house will not 
be surprised at the fact. That the occui)ant of such 
a mansion should, in colonial troubles, side with the 
government was as natural as the fealty of a Doug- 
las or a Howard to the king. The house, however, 
passed from his hands, and was purchased by the 
provincial government at the beginning of serious 
work with the mother-country. After the battle of 
Bunker Hill it was allotted to General Washington 
as his headquarters. It was entirely unfurnished, 
but the charity of neighbors filled it with necessary 
furniture. The southeastern room upon the lower 
floor, at the right of the front door, and now occupied 
as a study by Mr. Longfellow, was devoted to the 
same purpose by Washington. The room over it, as 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 69 

Madame Craigie lias already informed us, was his 
chamber. The room upon the lower floor, in the rear 
of the study, which was afterwards enlarged, and is 
now the Poet's library, was occupied by the aids-de- 
camp of the commander-in-chief. And the southwest 
room upon the lower floor was Mrs. Washington's 
drawing-room. The rich old wood- carving in this 
apartment is still remarkable, still certifies the fre- 
quent presence of fine society. For, although during 
the year in which Washington occupied the mansion 
there could have been as little desire as means for gay 
festivity, yet Washington and his leading associates 
were all gentlemen — men who would have graced the 
elegance of a court with the same dignity that made 
the plainness of a republic admirable. Many of 
Washington's published letters are dated from this 
house. And could the walls whisper, we should hear 
more and better things of him than could ever be re- 
corded. In his chamber are still the gay-painted tiles 
peculiar to fine houses of the period ; and upon their 
quaint and grotesque images the glancing eyes of the 
Poet's children now wonderingly linger, where the sad 
and doubtful ones of Washington must have often 
fallen as he meditated the darkness of the future. 
Many of these peculiarities and memories of the man- 
sion aj)pear in the Poet's verses. In the opening of 
the poem ' To a Child ' the tiles are painted anew : 



70 HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 

' The lady with the gay raacaw, 
The dancing girl, the grave Bashaw 

With bearded lip and chin ; 
And, leaning idly o'er his gate, 
Beneath the imperial fan of state, 

The Chinese mandarin.' 

•' The next figure that distinctly appears in the old 
house is that .of Thomas Tracy, a iDersonage of whom 
the household traditions are extremely fond. He was 
a rich man in the fabulous style of the East — such a 
nabob as Oriental imaginations can everywhere easily 
conjure, while practical experience wonders that they 
are so rare. He carried himself with a rare lavish- 
ness. Servants drank costly wines from carved 
pitchers in the incredible days of Thomas Tracy ; 
and in his stately mansion a hundred guests sat down 
to banquets, and jDledged their liost in draughts 
whose remembrances keep his name sweet, as royal 
bodies were preserved in wine and spices. In the 
early days of national disorder he sent out privateers 
to scour the seas, and bleed SiDanish galleons of 
their sunniest juices, and reap golden harvests of 
fruits and spices, of silks and satins, from East and 
West Indian ships, that the bountiful table of Vas- 
sal House might not fail, nor the carousing days 
of Thomas Tracy become credible. But these ' spa- 
cious times' of the large-hearted and large-handed 



y 



/ 



HENR Y WADS WOR TH L ONGFELL OW. 71 

gentleman suddenly ended. The wealthy man failed ; 
no more hundred guests appeared at banquets ; no 
more privateers sailed into Boston Bay, reeking with 
riches from every zone ; Spain, the Brazils, the Indies 
no more rolled their golden sands into the pockets of 
Thomas Tracy ; servants, costly wines, carved pitch- 
ers, all began to glimmer and go, and finally Thomas 
/* Tracy and his incredible days vanished as entirely as 

the gorgeous pavilions with which the sun in setting 
piles the summer west. 

"After this illuminated chai:)ter in the history of 
the house CaiDtain Joseph Lee, a brother of Madame 
Tracy, appears in the annals, but does not seem to 
have illustrated them by any special gifts or graces. 
Tradition remains silent, pining for Thomas Tracy, un- 
til it lifts its head upon the entry into the house of 
Andrew Craigie, apothecary -general to the Northern 
j)rovincial army, who amassed a fortune in that office, 
which, like his great predecessor, he presently lost, 
but not until he had built a bridge over the Charles 
River, connecting Cambridge with Boston, which is 
still known by his name. Andrew Craigie did much 
for the house, even enlarging it to its present form ; 
but tradition is hard uxDon him. It declares that he 
was a huge man, heavy and dull, and evidently 
looks upon his career as the high l37ric of Thomas 
Tracy's, muddled into tough prose. In the best and 



luosi piosjHM'ous (Inys (>f Andnnv (Mii^io llu* tvslalo 
comiMisod \\\o limidrod acn^s. I'pon tht> sito of tlu> 
pi'tvstMit t>l>s«M-\ ntoi'v. Mot h\Y froni tlu^ lunnsiou, stocul 
a suiunuM' lu>iist>, h\\\ \\\\c[\\cv of any rait> archihM'l ii 
ral (hn ice wlu^tluM', in fact, any oiphic i;tMiiiis of 
llu>st^(l!lys 'Na'ur a miuuihm' lioust\ wliicli, lik«» dial of 
Mr. KiiuM'soirs, only lacktHl 'soioutiru^ ananpMiuMil ' 
to bo i^iito |HM'fo("t iloos iu>t appoar. LiktMlu^apo- 
llu>»'ary lo [\\o Ni>rtluMU aiaiy. I li(> suhimum' lioiis(> is 
ii'oiu', as liktMvist> an aiintnluct that bi\>n,i:.'lit wator a 
quart(M" of a \\\\\k\ 'rrailllion, so (Miainoivd of 'Prary, 
is ^iiiMa>n>ns tMioui;h tt> luontion a liijimM- jnuty givtai 
by Amht^w Cnnu'itMntMT Satnrday, ami on oiuMU'ca- 
sivMi |H>in(s onl poiiiktHl anil |H>\\tl«M«Hl TalK^N rand 
anionii' tlu\u"uosts. This bt»t rays ilu> pn\sonct^ in lla* 
h*Mist^ (>f tiu> btvst sooit^ty lluMi to W Jiad. lUit tho 
piospt>fous rnii^it* ('i>nld not avoid tht> fat(> ^.'>{ his 
»>|>Mlt>nl pivdooovssor, \vhi> also uavt^ banvpuMs. Tlnuus 
rushod on ti>o rapidly for him. Tho bndp\ aqu<Hhu't. 
ami sumnuM" lionso, two luinditHi aiavs and an tMdaii;- 
tnl litniso, \V(MV too nimdi for tlu* fortuut* aiHpiirtul in 
(h^alini;- nunliraJiUMits to tlu> N'ortluan army. The 
' spaoions titntvs ' of AndroAv Crai^io also camt* to an 
tM\d. A vi^i(^M• walktHl With him through his larj^v 
and hanvlsomo i\>oms, and, struck with admirativ»n, 
oxohiiniod : *Mr ('raiiiit\ I sl»onhl tlunk yi>n Avoidd 
Iv^so yom^olf in all this spaciousaoss.' 'Mr.' t^tnuli- 



iii'.Nh'Y nA/>.'iU'0/r//f J.oh'Ci-Ei.LOVV. 73 



tion hjiH r<.r^^()l(<'ii I'Ik^ iiiuih-j, hiiid lln^ iK.Hj.ilii.l.ln 
:,i„| niiiicd IiomI,, 'I li(U)c losi- iriyH<-ir in it,' mid wn 
do iKil, liiid liiin :i|^':iiii. 

'*y\rLr,r InHdiHiippciinuKin Mth. (W\y\\i^\v., hrnvcily mwmI 
lowiiin- (,li(^ risiii/AM of pi-idc, Jiiid hMII nivc-sdiiiK i" •'<"'' 
<^li:i,i':irl,nr :iii<l drirM-iiiior lli<i woilliy itliHtniHH of ji, 
,„,M,, muiisioii, Id, i(M.iiis. Ivlwiird I'am-ivK, ivMidrd 
li(5r« jUHl, ;i,rUir hiH ni:uTiji|^<s :iiid wliihiwlill rr<»r<'MHor 
ill l,li«M'.()II('<!,(M)r which h(i w:iH JiflrrwMidH IM('si(h-iil. 
VVilliinl I'hillipM, .lured Spiirks, now Mm- h<-;id of 
(,he llnivcr.sily, iiiid Joseph 1''^. VVoireHler, I he liexi 
COgnil)her, h:iv«! :ill resi«hd here, HoJiieliirieH HhariiiK 
tJui hoiiHf; wilh Mrs. CiJii-;!*', :uid, in Um' <"MHe ol" Mr. 
W<)n!<!Ml,(jr, (»(5(;ii])yiiiK it- joinMy wilh Mr. liOiiMfellow 
\vh<'ri Mio ^r!iv«i old hVdy r<^rtiove,d Ikt Hl;il<ly liiilcm 
lor the l:isl (line." Siidi wjiH (JmiKl« HoiJHO, ilH Irii,- 
dilJoiis, .-uid e:iily dwejJerH, UH Miey were, r«fp(i!i(-ed jumI 
])!iiiit(rd liy Mr. (hirlis nboiit Ihirl.y yeju-H n^'o. 

TIk! letters of (IhiirieH Siiriiiier, who wfiH coniiecled 
by friendship :iiid iiileriniirrijiK*' with Mr. liOii;.!;rel 
low, lire si)riiikh'd wilh Jiiluslons l,r) his poelic nei^'li- 
l,or. IA,r exniriple, in a, letter to Dr. liiehe.r, !i,t New 
York, dated from lioston on Novernher 17, Ik:{(5, he 
writes: " LoM^leilow has i-eliirned hoine, having ar- 
rived only lliree dnyH ago, rnll of |,le:isaiil reminlH- 
cences and of li<-allh. He t(;lls me, Ihal Im; called 
upon Mitterniai*;!' wilh a, h-tler rroin yon. lie is a 



74 HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 

very i)leasaiit fellow, and will at once assume the 
charge of Ticknor's department." We learn a little 
further on that he left the Appletons in Switzerland. 
This brings me to a meeting between Mr. Longfellow 
and Mr. Samuel Ward at the house of Herr Adolph 
Zimmern, the banker of the latter, at Heidelberg, on 
an evening in March, 1836. There were present be- 
sides Mr. Ward and his man of millions Mrs. Wil- 
liam CuUen Bryant and her young daughter, and 
Professor Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The Port- 
lander and the New-Yorker adjourned early to the 
hotel of the latter, the Badischer Hof, where they 
talked until daybreak, of how Tieck used to read to 
them his admirable translations of Shakespeare, and 
poems by Uhland and the old balladists, and Iioav he 
told them of the noble rendering of Dante by Prince 
John of Saxony. The next day Mr. Ward went to 
the rooms of his late-and-early-talking friend, which 
were strewn with books, and were situated in a house 
on the main street with a view of the castle in the 
near distance. More and later talk over bottles of 
Rhine wine. Two days afterw^ards these tons cama- 
rades started for the town of Treves, the younger 
dropping behind at Mannheim. 

The rei^utation of Professor Longfellow began in 
the KnicJierhocJcer for September, 1838. Its germ 
was this: 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 75 



A PSALM OF LIFE. 

WHAT THE HEART OF THE YOUNG MAN' SAID TO THE 
PSALMIST. 

" Life that shall send 
A challenge to its end, 
And when it comes say, ' Welcome, friend ! ' " 

The summer before it appeared Mr. Ward visited 
the room of his young crony. It was at the Astor, in 
the fourth story, and was empty. Not exactly, for 
there was a jDoem there, probably "A Psalm of 
Life," which chanted itself into the soul of Willis 
and the purse of Lewis Gaylord Clark. Never since 
young Drake and Halleck had stirred New York to 
the deeps was there such a commotion. It passed 
from Halleck to Washington Irving, from the two to 
King, the editor of the American, and to Dr. Hawks, 
and from these to high and low. It did not pass to 
Mr. Edgar Allan Poe, who was on the eve of moving 
from Arch Street, Philadeli^hia, into a new house, 
a;nd was on the point of running his critical stiletto 
into Mr. Washington Irving. "A Psalm of Life" 
was a dirge of death to him, for he hated the psalm- 
ist, as he showed in the pages of the Gentleman^ s 
Magazine, of which he was soon to be Sylvanus 
Unurban. Here is what he wrote about "Voices 



76 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

of the Niglit" : "In looking over a file of news- 
papers not long ago our attention was arrested by 
the opening lines of a few stanzas headed 'Hymn 
to the Night.' We read them again and again, and, 
although some blemishes were readily discoverable, 
we bore them away in memory with the firm belief 
that a poet of high genius had at length arisen 
amongst us, and with the resolve to so exjDress our 
opinion at the first opportunity which should offer. 
The perusal of the entire volume now presented to 
the public by the author of this 'Hymn to the 
Night' has not, indeed, greatly modified our im- 
pressions in regard to that particular poem, not 
greatly even in regard to the genius of the poet, 
but very greatly in respect to his cai^acity for the 
ultimate achievement of any well-founded monu- 
ment, any enduring reputation. Our general con- 
clusion is one similar to that which 'Hyperion' in- 
duced, and which we stated of late in a concise notice 
of that book. The author has in one or two points 
ability, and in these one or two points that ability 
regards the very brightest qualities of the poetical 
soul. His imagination, for example, is vivid ; and in 
saying thus how much do we say ! But he appears 
to us singularly deficient in all those important facul- 
ties which give artistical form, and without which 
never was immortality effected. He has no combin- 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 77 

ing or binding force. He has absolutely nothing of 
unity, 

"His brief pieces (to whose brevity he has been 
led by an instinct of the deficiencies we now 
note) abound in high thoughts, either positively 
insulated, or showing these same deficiencies by the 
recherche spirit of their connection. And thus his 
productions are scintillations from the highest poet- 
ical truth, rather than this highest truth itself. By 
truth, here, we mean that x)erfection which is the 
result only of the strictest proportion and adapta- 
tion in all the poetical requisites — these requisites 
being considered as each existing in the highest 
degree of beauty and strength." This reads a 
little severely, but is mild beside the next paragraph, 
which was written shortly before it by the same in- 
cisive i3en : ' ' Were it x^ossible to thrust into a bag 
the lofty thought and manner of the ' Pilgrims of the 
Rhine,' together with the quirks and quibbles and 
true humor of ' Tristram Shandy,' not forgetting 
a few of the heartier drolleries of Rabelais and one 
or two of the Phantasy Pieces of the Lorrainean 
Callot, the whole, when well shaken up, and thrown 
out, would be a very tolerable imitation of ' Hy- 
perion.' This may aj)pear to be commendation, but 
we do not intend it as such. Works like this of Pro- 
fessor Longfellow are the triumphs of Tom o' Bed- 



78 HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 

lam and the grief of all true criticism. They are 
potent in unsettling tlie popular faith in Art— a 
faith which at no day more than the present needed 
the support of men of letters. That such things 
succeed at all is attributable to the fact that there 
exist men of genius who now and then, unmindful 
of duty, indite them — that men, of genius ever indite 
them is attributable to the fact that they are often 
the most indolent of human beings. A man of true 
talent who would demur at the great labor requisite 
for the stern demands of high art — at that unre- 
mitting toil and patient elaboration which, when 
soul- guided, result in Beauty, Unity, Totality, and 
Truth — men, we say, who would demur at such 
labor make no scruple of scattering at random a 
profusion of rich thought in the pages of such far- 
ragoes as 'Hyperion.' Here, indeed, there is little 
trouble, but even that little is most unprofitably lost. 
To the writers of these things we say — all Ethics 
lie, and all History lies, or the world shall forget 
ye and your worJcs. We have no design of com- 
menting, at any length, upon what Professor Long- 
., fellow has written. We are indignant that he, too, 
has been recreant to the good cause. We, there- 
fore, dismiss his '•Hyperion' in brief. We grant 
him high qualities, but deny him the Future. In 
the present instance, without design, without shape, 



HENRY WADS IVOR rif LONGFELLOW. 79 

without beginning, middle, or end, what earthly 
object has his book accomplished 1 What definite 
impression has it left?" 

Let me present here, as the reverse of the Poe 
medal, an old, tattered letter which explains itself : 

" Cambridge, Dec. 7, 1839. 

"My deak Ollapod : I hoiDe this letter will find 
you in better health than when your last dateless 
epistle was written. You were then on the point of 
starting for New York and Albany. Have you got 
back again to Philadelphia, or did you not go out of 
its lovely gates ? I felt quite startled at the account 
you gave of your health. Why did you refuse to 
go to Santa Cruz ? You could have taken Willie or 
have left him with your brother. I think you were 
wrong. It would have been a delightful excursion. 
I hope you will think better of it and go, even now. 
It will not do for you to sit at home and grieve your 
soul away. Your Autumnal Dirge is one of the most 
sweetly solemn poems I ever read. There is the dif- 
ference of writing from the heart and from the imagi- 
nation merely. In that poem I recognize my friend 
in his better hours. I got Clapp to publish it, with 
two or three lines introducing it, in his pa^Der. The 
piece is much admired here. 

' ' I am glad you find something good in ' IIyj)e- 
rion,' and trust that you will likewise find some- 
thing to like in 'Voices of the Mght,' which I shall 
send you next week, though there will be very little 
in the volume which you have not seen before. 



8o HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 



*' On tlie next page you will find two Literary No- 
tices, wliicli I wish yon would publish and send me 
a copy thereof. I think MenzeFs book will delight 
you vastly. Take my word for it. Spencer you 
have probably heard of before! 

"Now, Clark, don't let such an age pass before 
you write again. I never see your paper nor your 
handwriting nowadays. I sometimes think you have 
taken offence at something, yet cannot really believe 
so, but have put it down to multifariousness and 
ill-health. 

"Very truly yours, as ever, 

" HE?iRY Wad. Longfellow." 

To show Mr. Longfellow' s kindness I will give here 
the substance of two little notes which he wrote to 
me in November and December, 1871. They referred 
to a young j)erson who had recently emigrated to the 
United States, I have no doubt for good and sufficient 
reasons. He wrote and spoke several languages in- 
differently, English not being one of them ; sang 
some, and drew a great deal, especially at the long 
bow ; was rather at sea in regard to property, per- 
sonal, literary, and other; remembered to forget 
when he passed off a German translation for an 
American original, stating under precisely what cir- 
cumstances he happened to write it, and with the 
strongest and most impudent determination to be— he 
was already — a man of letters. This cool youth Mr. 



HEN'RY IVADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 



Longfellow took tlie liberty of introducing to me, 
though he had not the honor of his personal acquain- 
tance. He brought him a letter of introduction from 
an English lady of rank, and he was anxious to aid 
him in his plans. He wished to write for the perio- 
dicals, and Mr. Longfellow ventured to ask from me 
a friendly hearing for him. My friendly hearing, 
which would have been given any way, put a few 
shekels into his pockets, and put Mr. Longfellow to 
the trouble of writing again to me. He was obliged 
to me for what I had done, and his protege had writ- 
ten to him to express his gratification for my kind- 
ness. He enclosed the letter of introduction which 
induced him to appeal to me in his despair of doing 
anything for him there. Would I be so kind as to 
return the letter after I had read it? If Master 
Nameless could not make his way in New York with 
the start I had given him, he should despair of his suc- 
cess in the line he had chosen. With great regard 
and many thanks, he was mine faithfully. I have also 
before me another note from the pen of this genial 
gentleman, written in the early autumn of 1850, and 
addressed to a Southern man of letters who was 
stopping at the Revere House. He hopes that this 
child of the South will come out to Cambridge as 
early as he can, that he may have the pleasure of in- 
troducing him to any gentleman that he might like 



82 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 



to know there, and still have time to drive to Mount 
Auburn. He hopes also that he will do him the fa- 
vor to dine with him, and he will order dinner early, 
so that he may have ample time for the afternoon 
for Si^ringfield, if he still adhered to his plan of 
going that way. And he was his faithfully. The 
Shadow cloaked from head to foot has borne both 
away, one to the cemetery at Richmond that over- 
looks the winding James, the other to ]\Iount Auburn 
and his own river of song — the Charles. 

" And did you once see Shelley plain, 
And did he stop and sjDeak to you ? 
And did you speak to him again ? 
How strange it seems, and new ! " 

The mention of "Hyperion" and "Voices of the 
Mght" sends me back to Charles Sumner, who ad- 
dressed a letter from London to Mr. George S. Hil- 
lard, of Boston, on March 18, 1840: "I have just 
found Longfellow's 'Hyperion,' and shall sit up all 
night to devour it. I have bought up all the copies 
of ' Voices of the Night ' in London to give to my 
friends." Two years later Mr. Sumner wrote from 
Boston to his brother George : " I cannot forbear say- 
ing how much jDleasure it gave me to see your few 
words about Longfellow. He cares not at all for 
politics or statistics, for the Syrian question or the 



HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 83 

disasters of Afghanistan. But to him the magnifi- 
cent world of literature and Nature is open ; every 
beauty of sentiment and truth and language has for 
him a relish ; and every heart that feels is sure of a 
response from him. I feel for his genius and worth 
the greatest reverence, as for him personally the 
warmest love." Sumner's letters, always charming, 
are never more charming than when they follow the 
fortunes of his friend, whom they bring before us 
continually. One would like to know when he final- 
ly became Master of Craigie House. Sumner shall 
tell us, speaking from Cambridge on May 9, 1841: 
"Once again from the headquarters of our great 
chief. Since I last wrote you Mrs. Craigie, the wi- 
dow of the builder of Craigie' s Bridge and the own- 
er of this house, has died and been removed from 
the spacious rooms to a narrow bed at Mount Au- 
burn." He shall also tell us, as he told him, about 
the usefulness of his iDoems, in a letter from London 
in the autumn of 1842: "A few days ago an old 
classmate, upon whom the world had not smiled, 
came to my office to prove some debts before me in 
bankruptcy. While writing the formal parts of the 
paper I inquired about his reading and the books 
which interested him now (I believe that he has been 
a great reader). He said that he read very little; 
that he hardly found anything that was written from 



84 HENR V WADS WOR TH L ONGFELLO IF. 

tlie heart and was really true. ' Have you read Long- 
fellow's "Hyperion"?' I said. 'Yes,' lie replied, 
'and I admire it very much. I think it is a very 
great book.' He then added, in a very solemn man- 
ner : 'I think I may say that Longfellow's "Psalm 
of Life " saved me from suicide. I first found it on 
a scrap of newspaper, in the hands of two Irishwo- 
men, soiled and worn, and I was at once touched by 
it.' Think, my dear friend, of this soul into which 
you have poured the waters of life. Such a tribute 
is higher than the words of Rogers, much as I value 
them." 

Two brief extracts from Sumner's letters shall con- 
clude what I have to say about Longfellow's life at 
Craigie House at this time. He is writing to Mr. 
John Jay, of New York, from Boston, on May 25, 
1843: "If you and Mrs. Jay should visit Boston — 
perhax)s Nahant may be an attraction in the heats of 
summer — we all count upon renewing our acquain- 
tance with you. You will probably find Longfellow 
a married man, for he is now engaged to Miss Fanny 
Appleton — the Mary Ashburton of 'Hyperion' — a 
lady of the greatest sweetness, imagination, and ele- 
vation of character, with the most striking personal 
charms." About two months later he writes to 
Dr. Lieber : " Longfellow is to be happy for a 
fortnight in the shades of Cambridge, then to visit 



HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 85 

his wife's friends in Berkshire, then his own. I 
am all alone— alone. My friends fall away from 
me." 

The extravagance of Mr. Sumner's opinion of Mr. 
Longfellow's poetry leads me to observe that I have 
wandered too far away from it; so, without more 
ado, I will go back to where I was when I began to 
track him through this labyrinth of reminiscence. 
His first literary labors in Craigie House, as nearly as 
I can make out, were a paper on "Frithiof s Saga," 
and another on his friend Hawthorne's "Twice-told 
Tales," both of which were published in the NortJi 
American in 1837.- It is to his honor as well as 
his sagacity that he was among the earliest to dis- 
cover and proclaim the excellence of Hawthorne's 
imaginative stories and essays. These papers were 
followed daring the next year by one ui^on "Anglo- 
Saxon Literature," and a second upon "Paris in the 
Seventeenth Century." K they are pleasant reading 
for leisure moments after the lapse of forty years— 
and they certainly are— they were much better read- 
ing when the dew and the bloom were upon them. 
For, without boasting in regard to our familiarity 
with other literatures than our own, there can be no 
manner of doubt that our ancestors knew much less 
about them than we do ; there can also be no manner 
of doubt that our earliest knowledge of German lite- 



86 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

rature is largely due to the writings of Professor Long- 
fellow. The first Englishman to transplant the wild 
flowers and wilder weeds of the German garden into 
the parterres of England was the Mr. Benjamin 
Thompson who translated "The Stranger" of Kotze- 
bue — that lugubrious, sentimental melodrama which 
drenched with hot tears the handkerchiefs of our 
grandmothers (possibly our own, likewise, in the 
green and salad days), which Sheridan declared that 
he had written every word of, and in which the Foth- 
eringay was so magnificent, as poor Pendennis found 
to his cost. Mr. Thompson was succeeded by Mr. 
Coleridge, two years afterwards, with a spirited but 
loose rendering of Schiller's " Wallenstein," and he 
by Mr. Lewis with wonder-tales and other diablerie 
for the closet and the stage and hysteria, whose read- 
ing of "Faust" to Shelley resulted in that glorious 
fragment of a translation of his, and indirectly re- 
sulted in Byron's "Deformed Transformed." They 
came in troops and battalions — forgotten translators 
of indifferent German into bad English : Gillies, 
De Quincey, and Carlyle, who represented scholarly 
waste, opiates, and dyspeptic eccentricity. The glory 
of first scattering a largesse of German fancy and 
feeling in the New World belongs to Henry Wads- 
worth Longfellow. The papers that I have enume- 
rated were written, or finished, at Craigie House, as 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 87 

well as a series of others descrii^tive of travel in Ger- 
many and Switzerland, throDgh wliich, like a silken 
string tlirougli a rosary of beads, ran a slight per- 
sonal story, half real, half imaginative, and through- 
out poetic. It concerned itself with the life-his- 
tory of Paul Flemming, a tender-hearted, rather 
shadowy young gentleman, who had lost the friend 
of his youth and had gone abroad, that the sea 
might be between him and the grave. "Alas! be- 
tween him and his sorrow there could be no sea but 
that of time." He loitered from place to place, not- 
ing what hit his sensitive fancy, and prattling about 
men and women and books — pilgrim, student, and 
dreamer. The hand that had penned "Outre-Mer" 
was visible in every word of ''Hyperion," but the 
hand had grown firmer in the Craigie House than it 
was at Bowdoin, and the learned sympathies of the 
j)enman had embraced the singularities of a richer 
literature than that of old Si:)ain and old France. 
Dismissing the romantic element of "Hyperion" for 
what it is worth (and there must have been genuine 
worth in it, since it was the cause of its immediate 
popularity), the chief and permanent value of the 
book lay in the new element of German fantasy and 
romanticism which it poured into American letters. 
It would have come in time, witliout doubt, but to 
Professor Longfellow belongs the honor of having has- 



88 HENRY WADSIVORTH LONGFELLOW. 



tened the time and usliered in the dawn. He was the 
herald of German Poetry in the New World. The 
second book of "Hyperion" contains, I believe, his 
first published translations from the German — the 
"Whither?" of Midler. The third book contains 
"The Black Knight," "The Castle by the Sea," 
"The Song of the Silent Land," and "Beware!" 
Besides these translations in verse there is, in the 
first book, a chapter on "Jean Paul, the Only One," 
and in the second book a chapter on "Goethe," 
whom Mr. Paul Flemming does not greatly admire. 
His friend, the Baron, defends the old heathen by 
saying that he is an artist and copies nature. ' ' So did 
the artists who made the bronze lamps of Pompeii. 
Would you hang one of those in your hall ? To say 
that a man is an artist and copies nature is not 
enough. There are two great schools of art— the 
imitative and the imaginative. The latter is the 
more noble and the more enduring." 

The dignity of the literary profession was earnestly 
maintained by Mr. Longfellow. "I do not see," 
said the Baron, in one of his conversations with Paul 
Flemming — "I do not see why a successful book is 
not as great an event as a successful campaign, only 
different in kind, and not easily compared." The 
lives of literary men are melancholy pictures of 
man's strength and weakness, and on that very ac- 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 89 

count, he thought, were profitable for encourage- 
ment, consolation, and warning. "And after all," 
continued Flemming, "perhaps the greatest lesson 
which the lives of literary men teach us is told in a 
single word : Wait ! Every man must patiently bide 
his time. He must wait. More particularly in lands 
like my native land, where the pulse of life beats 
with such feverish and impatient throbs, is the les- 
son needful. Our national character wants the dig- 
nity of repose. We seem to live in the midst of a 
battle — there is such a din, such a hurrying to and 
fro. In the streets of a crowded city it is difiicult 
to walk slowly. You feel the rushing of the crowd, 
and rush with it onward. In the press of our life 
it is difficult to be calm. In this stress of wind and 
tide, all professions seem to drag their anchors and 
are swept out into the main. The voices of the Pre- 
sent say, ' Come ! ' But the voices of the Past say, 
' Wait ! ' With calm and solemn footsteps the ris- 
ing tide bears against the rushing torrent up stream, 
and pushes back tlie hurrying waters. With no less 
calm and solemn footsteps, nor less certainty, does 
a great mind bear up against public opinion and 
loush back its hurrying stream. Therefore should 
every man wait— should bide his time. Not in list- 
less idleness, not in useless pastime, not in queru- 
lous dejection, but in constant, steady, cheerful en- 



90 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

deavors, always willing and fulfilling, and accom- 
plisliing his task, that, when the occasion conies, he 
may be equal to the occasion. And if it never conies, 
what matters it? What matters it to the world 
whether I, or you, or another man did such a deed 
or wrote such a book, so be it the deed and book 
were well done % It is the part of an indiscreet and 
troublesome ambition to care too much about fame, 
about what the world says of us ; to be always look- 
ing into the faces of others for approval ; to be al- 
ways anxious for the effect of what we do and say ; 
to be always shouting to hear the echo of our own 
voices. If you look about you, you will see men 
who are Avearing life aA\'ay in feverish anxiety of 
fame, and the last we shall ever hear of them Avill 
be the funeral bell that tolls them to their early 
graves ! Unhappy men, and unsuccessful ! because 
their purpose is, not to accomplish well their task, 
but to clutch the ' trick and fantasy of fame ' ; and 
they go to their graves with purposes unaccom- 
plished and wishes unfulfilled. Better for them, 
and for the world in their example, had they known 
how to wait ! Believe me, the talent of success is 
nothing more than doing what you can do well, and 
doing well whatever you do, without a thought of 
fame. If it come at all, it will come because it is 
deserved, not because it is sought after. And, more- 



HENRY WADSWORTff LONGFELLOW. 91 

over, there will be no misgivings, no disappointment, 
no hasty, feverish, exhausting excitement." 

If fame comes because it is deserved, which may- 
or may not be true, assuredly it comes to some much 
sooner than to others — much sooner to the Byrons 
than the Wordsworths, the Longfellows than the 
Hawthornes— why, their contemporaries and rivals 
do not i)erceive as clearly as those who come after 
them. Poor Mr. Poe could never understand why 
Mr. Longfellow was a more successful writer than 
he was. He might have discovered the reason, how- 
ever, if he had looked for it, since it lay upon the 
surface of the American character. Our ideals were 
not lofty forty years ago, nor are they very lofty 
now. But then, as now, we knew what we wanted 
in song and art, and we thought we could distinguish 
what was new from Avhat was old. We knew what 
to expect from our poets. Bryant was calm, medi- 
tative, philosophic ; Willis, when not modishly 
Scriptural, was light and airy ; Halleck, spirited and 
martial ; Pierpont, occasional and moral— a few epi- 
thets described them, and others who were not worthy 
to rank with them. We recognized their excellence, 
but it by no means exhausted our admiration and 
capacity for greater excellence. There was— there 
always is— room for a new poet, though old poets, and 
old critics, and old readers are generally slow to ad- 



92 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

mit the fact. Tliere were fertile gardens wliicli yield- 
ed our elder singers no flowers — gardens in whicli no 
seed of theirs had ever been sown, or, having been 
sown, had refused to germinate. I scarcely know 
how to describe the seed which Professor Longfellow 
began to scatter in "Hyperion" and '' Voices of the 
Night." Romanticism does not describe it, for there 
is nothing romantic in "The Hymn to the Night" ; 
nor does morality describe it, excei)t, jDerhaps, as it 
bourgeoned in "A Psalm of Life." The lesson of the 
last was the lesson of endurance, and patience, and 
cheerfulness. It had been taught by other poets, 
but not as this one taught it — not in verse that set 
itself to music in the memory of thousands, and in 
words that were pictures. The young man who wrote 
"A Psalm of Life" possessed the art of saying 
things, and a very rare art it is. Shakespeare possess- 
ed it in a sui)reme degree, and Pope and Gray in a 
greater measure than greater poets. Merciless critics 
have pointed out flaws in the literary workmanship 
of "A Psalm of Life," but its readers never saw 
them, or, seeing them, never cared for them. They 
found it a hopeful, helpful poem. "Footsteps of 
Angels" is to me the most satisfactory of all these 
nocturnal melodies. There is an indescribable ten- 
derness in it, and the vision of the poet's dead wife 
gliding into his chamber with noiseless footsteps, 



HENRY WADS IVOR Til LONGFELLOW. g^ 

taking a vacant cliair beside him, and laying her 
hand in his, is very pathetic. "The Beleaguered 
City" is a product of poetic arfcihce of which there 
are but few examx^les in English i3oetry. It aiDpears 
to have been compounded after a recix)e which called 
for equal parts of outward fact and inward meaning. 
Griven a material city, a river, a fog, and so on, the 
poet sets his wits to work to discover what corre- 
sponds, or can be made to correspond, with them 
spiritually. If he is skilful he constructs an inge- 
nious poem of doubtful intellectual value. ""Mid- 
night Mass for the Dying Year" is a medley of medi- 
aeval suggestion and Shakespearean remembrance 
which demands a large and imaginative apx)reciation. 
The Shakespearean element seems to me out of place, 
though it adds to its imi)ressiveness and effect as a 
whole. It is a medley, however, as I have said, and 
it must be judged by its own fantastic laws. What- 
ever faults disfigured "Voices of the Night" were 
lost sight of, or forgiven, for the sake of the beauties, 
and for the admirable poetic sx)irit which these beau- 
ties displayed. Such substantially is what I wTote 
four years ago, after re-reading the poems in ques- 
tion, and after mature deliberation, and I cannot de- 
part from it now. 

Tlie growing popularity of Mr. Longfellow was 
hateful to the Jealous spirit of Mr. Poe, who accused 



94 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

him of plagiarizing from Tennyson in liis ' ' Midnight 
Mass for the Dying Year," and from himself in "The 
Beleaguered City." He emi)hasized the last charge 
in a note to the Reverend Rufus Wilmot Griswold 
under the date of March 22 (1841). Dr. Griswold 
was about to publish his "Poets of America," and 
Mr. Poe, who naturally desired to see himself among 
them, sent him what he considered his best poems, 
one or two of which he would be proud to see in his 
book. "The one called 'The Haunted Palace' is 
that of which I spoke in reference to Professor Long- 
fellow's plagiarism. I first published the 'H. P.' in 
Brooks' s Museum, a monthly journal of Baltimore, 
now dead. AfteHvards I embodied it in a tale called 
' The House of Usher,' in Burton's Magazine. Here 
it w^as, I suppose, that Professor Longfellow saw^ it ; 
for about six weeks afterw^ards there appeared in the 
Southern Literary Messenger a poem by him called 
' The Beleaguered City,' which may be found in his 
volume. The identity in title is striking, for by 
' The Haunted Palace ' I mean to imply a mind 
haunted by phantoms — a disordered brain ; and by 
' The Beleaguered City ' Prof. L. means just the 
same. But the whole tournure of the i)oem is based 
upon mine, as you will see at once. Its allegorical 
conduct, the style of its versification and expression 
— all are mine." 1 have just re-read "The Haunted 



HENRY WADSIVORTH LONGFELLOW. 



95 



Palace" and "The Beleaguered City," with a view 
to substantiating or refuting Mr. Poe's charge of 
plagiarism against Mr. Longfellow, and, for the life of 
me, I can find nothing in it. It was either the delu- 
sion of a disordered brain, such as thej^ both cele- 
brated, or it was the weak invention of an enemy. 
There was a mountain in Macedon, and a mountain in 
Wales, and Poe's vf^s—JSrascitur monte ridicidus 
mus. But the ingenious Mr. Poe was not alone in 
depreciating Professor Longfellow ; for Miss Marga- 
ret Fuller, as able, and honest, and conscientious a 
gentlewoman as ever wielded the goose-quill in any 
country, shared his heretical opinions, and promul- 
gated her critical censure at a later period. Let me 
give here the precis of this censure, as I find it in 
her " Papers on Literature and Art," and as it proba- 
bly appeared in the New York Tribune. My notes 
are not so clear as I could wish, but I believe they 
represent the words— they certainly do the thoughts 
—of Miss Fuller. I cannot be sure of the order of 
their succession: "We must confess to a coolness 
towards Mr. Longfellow in consequence of the ex- 
aggerated praises that have been bestowed upon him. 
When we see a person of moderate powers receive 
honors which should be reserved for the highest, we 
feel somewhat like assailing him, and taking from 
him the crov/n which should be reserved for grander 



gS HENRY WADS won TH LONGFELLOW. 

brows. And yet tliis is, perhaps, ungenerous. It 
may be tliat the management of publishers, the hy- 
perbole of paid or undiscriminating reviewers, or 
some accidental cause which gives a temporary inte- 
rest to iDroductions beyond what they would perma- 
nently command, have raised such an one to a place 
as much above his wishes as his claims, and which he 
would rejoice, with honorable modesty, to vacate at 
the approach of a worthier. We the more readily 
believe this of Mr. Longfellow, as one so sensible of 
the beauties of other writers, and so largely indebted 
to them, must know his comparative rank better than 
his readers have known it for him. Sq much adula- 
tion is dangerous, for he is so lauded on all hands 
that he is now able to collect his poems, which have 
so widely circulated in previous volumes, and been 
paid for so handsomely by the handsomest annu- 
als, and have them illustrated by the most distin- 
guished of our younger artists, and has found a flat- 
terer in that very artist." Miss Fuller strenuously 
objected to the portrait, especially the eyes, which 
had an expression thrown into them that the original 
lacked, and which made the rest of the face look 
more weak, suggesting the idea of a dandy Pindar. 
" Such is not the case with Mr. Longfellow himself. 
He is not a Pindar, though he is sometimes a dandy, 
even in the clean and elegantly ornamented streets 



HENRY WADSIVORTH LONGFELLOW. 97 



and trim gardens of liis verse. But he is still a man 
of cultured taste, delicate though not deep feeling, 
and some, though not much, poetic force. Mr. Long- 
fellow has been accused of plagiarism. We have 
been surprised that any one should have been anx- 
ious to fasten special charges of this sort upon him, 
when we had supposed it so obvious that the greater 
part of his mental stores were derived from the works 
of others. He has no style of his own growing out 
of his own experiences and observations of nature. 
Nature, with him, whether human or external, is 
always seen through the windows of literature. 
There are in his poems sweet and tender passages 
descriptive of his personal feelings, but very few 
showing him as an observer, at first hand, of the 
passions within or the landscape without." 

But I will now leave Miss Fuller and Mr. Poe, of 
whom, I dare say, the readers of this Medley have 
had more than enough, and introduce them to a 
pleasanter person than either, the gentleman of whom 
I have already spoken— Mr. Samuel Ward. That Mr. 
Ward is an able financier, and a very bright writer 
both in prose and verse, is no secret to those who 
know him or have tracked the streams of his spark- 
ling fancy along the meadows of light and fugitive 
literature. The last writing of his that I have seen 
is a charming paper entitled " Days with Longfel- 



98 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

low," in the Nortli American for May ; and as it 
bears upon tlie literary as well as personal history of 
Mr. Longfellow, I intend to iise a page or two of it 
here. I begin with what he says after mentioning 
the eminent IS'ew- Yorkers who were captivated by the 
tender grace and the serious i^nrpose of " The Psalm 
of Life," the popularity of which is as great now as 
it was forty-five years ago : "I hardly need say that 
many of the matrons of our city and their young 
daughters committed the lyrical treasure to memory, 
and thus formed the nucleus of that expanding circle 
of English humanity to which so many of Longfel- 
low's future verses became household words. Our 
correspondence, stimulated, on my part, by admi- 
ration for this unsuspected genius of my friend, 
became and continued for several years extremely 
active. Sometimes I ventured to suggest a Ger- 
man poem as worthy of being transferred to our 
language, and, in several cases, a week or a fort- 
night brought me fresh proof of the marvellous 
adaptation of his mind and ear to perform what 
I heard him call, many years after, ' translation, the 
last infirmity of noble minds.' I was then reading 
Uhland, and I remember my surprise and delight at 
his version of the ' Luck of Edenhall ' and of the 
' Two Locks of Hair,' the latter, I believe, by Gustav 
Pfizer. 



HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 99 

"About this time, during the years from 1838 to 
1843, I made a practice of running on to Cambridge to 
spend Sunday and Monday at the Craigie House, and 
was always entertained by some new tender or heroic 
lyric. Once I carried to him Tegner's ' Children of 
the Lord's Supper,' which had been given to me by 
Baron Nordin, then Swedish minister at Washington. 
Familiar as he was with all the Scandinavian lan- 
guages, he devoured this poem silently, kept it, and, 
when I returned a fortnight after, read me his lovely 
version in the hexameter of the original. It seemed 
to have been written at one gush, for he took the 
manuscript from a closet, and I observed that it was 
written in pencil, \Y\i\\ few, if any, corrections. In 
fact, like the occultists of the East, he seemed noise- 
lessly to have projected his work straight from his 
brain upon the paper. He v/as a noiseless craftsman, 
and performed his work with a neatness and despatch 
I have never seen equalled. He was method itself in 
aU his arrangements, and could lay his hand upon 
the most minute note or manuscrij)t, however long it 
had lain hidden in its repository. 

"I remember once his writing to me to come on 
next Sunday, as he had something to show me and 
to consult me about. I obeyed the call with alacrity, 
and reached the house, as usual, in season for a tub 
before breakfast. It was his habit, during the boiling 



lOO HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

of liis coffee-kettle, to work, at a standing-desk, upon 
a translation of Dante. So soon as the kettle hissed 
he folded his portfolio, not to resume that work until 
the following morning. In this wise, by devoting ten 
minutes a day during many years, the lovely work 
grew, like a coral reef, to its completion. On the 
morning of the day in question, however, that task 
was relinquished, and, after breakfast, he told me that 
he had recently written a poem which smiled to him, 
but which his habitual counsellors and companions — 
who, I iDresume, were Charles Sumner, C. C. Felton, 
and George S. Hillard — had frowned uj)on as beneath 
the plane of his previous lyrical performances. He 
then proceeded to read me the ' Skeleton in Armor,' 
which so stirred my blood that I took the manuscript 
from his hands and read it to him, with more dramatic 
force than his modesty had permitted him to display. 
This may have been presumptuous on my part, but I 
remember, when I came to the crescendo^ 

' As with his wings aslant, 
Sails the fierce cormorant, 
Seeking- some rocky haunt 

With his prey laden ; 
So towai'd the open main, 
Beating to sea again 
Through the wild hurricane, 
Bore I the maiden,' 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. loi 

lie sprang to his feet and embraced me. The doubt- 
ing Thomases were at a discount that morning. This 
23oem revealed to me his methods of worli. After 
the emotions of mutual satisfaction had subsided he 
told me that he had carried the scheme in his head 
ever since the previous summer, when, after having 
visited, with a cavalcade of my brothers and sisters 
— among whom was the present Mrs. Julia Ward 
Howe — the skeleton in armor dug up at Taunton, 
and then visible in a museum at Fall River — since 
burned to the ground — he challenged my sister, in 
their home gallop over the Newport beaches, to make 
a poem out of the rusty hauberk and grim bones they 
had been inspecting. ' That,' said he, ' was nearly a 
year ago, and the poem only flashed upon me last 
week.' It will be remembered that the closing scene 
is laid 

' In that tower 
Which to this very hour 
Is looking' seaward.' 

" And now comes a curious illustration of the mar- 
ket value of iDoetry, j^ast and present. I proposed to 
take the manuscript to New York and sell it for not 
less than fifty dollars. On my return thither my first 
visit was to the poet Halleck, at his desk in the dingy 
counting-house of the primeval John Jacob Astor, in 



I02 HENRY WADSWORTir LONGFELLOW. 

Prince Street. We had often talked about Longfel- 
low, and Halleck felt and displayed a lively apprecia- 
tion of his genius, which he denied to the English 
laureate, whom we all venerate. The old poet was 
delighted with this new effusion of his younger lyri- 
cal brother, and, knowing the value of his opinion in 
the eyes of our literati, I asked him to express his 
admiration in a few brief words at the foot of the 
manuscript. If I remember rightly the inscription 
ran : ' I unhesitatingly pronounce the above to be, 
in my opinion, Professor Longfellow's finest effort.' 
This was duly signed, and I rushed down to Lewis 
Gaylord Clarke, of the Knickerhoclcer Magazine, 
who stood aghast when I announced the price of this 
poem, he having only paid twenty-five dollars for 
its predecessors. The intrinsic beauty of the lyric, 
which by this time I had learned to read with tole- 
rable effect, overcame a reluctance to which his pov- 
erty, not his will, consented, and I had imde and 
pleasure in remitting the fifty dollars to Cambridge 
that evening." 

Mr. Longfellow's character as a poet was determin- 
ed by his next volume, "Ballads and Other Poems," 
which was more mature and more robust than 
"Voices of the Night," and Avhich made his readers 
feel sure that he felt sure of himself. "The Skele- 
ton in Armor" was the most vigorous poem that he 



HENRY WADS WOE Til LONGFELLOW. 103 

had yet written — a strong conception embodied in 
terse, picturesque, sweeping words, and in a measure 
wliicli liad not been used, so far as I remember, for 
more than two centuries — the magnificent measure 
of old Michael Drayton's "Ballad of Agincourt." 
I do not see where a line, a phrase even, could be 
spared or imi:)roved. It is as compact, as imperish- 
able, as adamant. Two new elements not previously 
noticed cropped out in this collection of Mr, Long- 
fellow' s song. One was the x^ower of beautifying com- 
mon things, the clothing of the palpable and familiar 
with golden, exhalations of the dawn ; the other was 
the oft-renewed and always dangerous exjDeriment 
of hexameter verse. What I mean by beautifying 
common things is the making a village blacksmith a 
subject, and an appropriate subject, for poetry, Mr, 
Longfellow has done this, I do not know how, and 
has, likewise, drawn a lesson, for which I care no- 
thing. More purely poetical, more gracious and spiri- 
tual, than this paradoxical "Village Blacksmith" are 
"Endymion" and "Maidenhood," the spirit of the 
last being as refined as the budding nature which it 
describes with such exquisite i)urity and tenderness. 
Very different from these are "It is not always 
May," "The Rainy Day," and "God's Acre," each 
perfect of its kind, and, until one has mastered the 
ait of each kind, of difficult accomplishment, "The 



I04 HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 

Hainy Day," for example, is in the manner of "The 
Beleaguered City " — a bad manner, which for once has 
produced a good poem. "To the River Charles" is 
a glimpse of Professor Longfellow's early Cambridge 
life, and the art of it is jDerfect. By far the most 
popular piece here, "Excelsior," has more moral 
than poetical value. The conception of a young man 
carrying a banner up a mountain suggests a set scene 
in a drama or opera, and the end of this imaginary 
stripling does not affect us as it should — does not 
affect me at all — his attempt to excel being so fool- 
hardy. That he would — that he must — be frozen to 
death was a foregone conclusion. 

The most imj)ortant of all the translations in Mr. 
Longfellow's second collection was '^The Children of 
the Lord's Supper," from the Swedish of Tegner. It 
revived, as I have intimated, the attempt to natural- 
ize the hexameter in English verse — an attemj)t which 
he had made four years before in his paper on 
"Frithiof's Saga," where he translated into this 
measure the description of Frithiof s ancestral estate 
at Framnas. As I have something to say about the 
hexameter and its vicissitudes, I must carry my read- 
ers back for a moment to the latter half of the six- 
teenth century, when the poetic mind of Elizabeth's 
England was clamoring for a new departure in mea- 
sure. It originated simultaneously, or nearly so, in 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 105 

the half -addled brains of a number of pedantic poet- 
asters, among whom was Gabriel Harvey, who pro- 
jected what w^as called the " English reformed versi- 
fying," and w^hat, if it had been successful, would 
have reformed versifying out of England, and caused 
"a general surceasing of rhyme." This project Avas 
taken up by a coterie who were for abolishing rhyme 
altogether and introducing in its stead the Latin sys- 
tem of quantity. They amused themselves, and iDro- 
bably bored each other, by writing hexameters, j)enta- 
meters, sapphics, and what not, and Si^enser, who 
was drawn into the foolish scheme, worked away for 
a twelvemonth (as Professor Child tells us) at hexa- 
meters and iambic trimeters quite seriously, going so 
far as to w^ite an " Epithalamion Thamesis " in quan- 
titative metre, which, happily for his reputation, never 
saw the light. One of the first to take this infection 
was Master Abraham Fraunce, concerning w^hom and 
his performances Mr, Edw^ard Phillips, in his " Thea- 
trum Poetarum" (1675); Mr. William Winstanley, 
in "The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets" 
(1687) ; and Mr. Gerard Langbaine, in "An Account of 
the English Dramatick Poets" (1691), free their criti- 
cal minds according to the crabbed fashion of their 
period. Mister Ritson— as he insisted upon desig- 
nating himself— enumerates, in his " Bibliographia 
Poetica," six of Master Fraunce' s titles between 1588 



lo6 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

and 1592, one being " The Lamentations of Amintas 
for the Death of Phillis" ; another, "The Countess of 
Pembroke' s Emanuel ' ' ; and a third, ' ' Lawyer' s Lo- 
gic"! It sliook — this ioUy — the fealty to rhyme 
of Spenser, Sidney, Dyer, and other lesser lumina- 
ries in the heaven of English song. It did not shake 
the fealty of Thomas Nash, a savage young satirist, 
who immediately declared war upon Harvey, a rope- 
maker's son, and upon the hexameter, whom he ad- 
mitted to be a gentleman of an ancient house (dating 
back, he might have added, to the ringing plains of 
windy Troy), but who, he conceived, was not at home 
in the English language, which was too craggy for 
him to run his long plough in — a censure in which 
he was anticij^ated by good old Roger Ascham, who 
declared (in substance) that the just-mentioned long 
plough trotted and hobbled rather than ran smoothly 
therein. After this time and this squabble the un- 
fortunate hexameter 

" Sank like the day-star in the ocean's bed " 

for about tAvo and a quarter centuries, when he 
popped up his head again in Southey's "Vision of 
Judgment"— a j)iece of obsequious profanity — and 
brought down the bludgeon of Byi"on upon the heads 
of poor Southey and George the Fourth. Such, so 
far as I remember, is the history of this alien mea- 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 107 



sure in English poetry. Mr. Longfellow thought 
well of it, as we have seen, and was justified in so 
thinking from the excellence of his own practice in 
hexameters. "The Children of the Lord's Supper" 
is a charming poem, to which its antique setting is 
very becoming. 

Professor Longfellow made a third voyage to Eu- 
rope shortly after publishing his " Ballads and Other 
Poems," and spent the summer months on the Rhine. 
The fruits of this leisure were several poems, written 
at sea, and expressing his detestation of the Pecu- 
liar Institution. "Poems on Slavery" appeared in 
1842, and were dedicated to William Ellery Chan- 
ning, who did not live to read the poem in which his 
character and life-work were commemorated. The 
dedication, which has the ring of Campbell's lyrics 
contains a noble stanza : 

" Well clone ! Thy words are great and bold; 
At times they seem to me 
Like Luther's, in the days of old, 
Half battles for the free." 

" The Slave's Dream" is one of the few remember- 
able poems in this volume. It is exceedingly pic- 
turesque, and the movement of the stanzas is spirit- 
ed and rapid. If it reminds me of anything it is of 
Pringle's "Afar in the Desert," which, however, is 



lo8 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

very different, and much more carelessly wiitten. 
Even Poe admired "The Slave's Dream," particu- 
larly, I believe, the third of the stanzas which fol- 
low : 

' ' Wide through the landscape of his dreams 

The lordly Niger flowed ;- 
Beneath the palm-trees on the plain. 

Once more a king he strode ; 
And heard the tinkling caravans 

Descend the mountain-road. 

" He saw once more his dark-eyed queen 

Among her children stand; 
They clasi^ed his neck, they kissed his cheeks, 

They held him hy the hand ! — 
A tear burst from the sleeper's lids 

And fell into the sand. 

" And then at furious speed he rode 

Along the Niger's bank ; 
His bridle-reins were golden chains, 

And, with a martial clank, 
At each leap he could feel his scabbard of steel 

Smiting his stallion's flank. 

*' Before him, like a blood-red flag, 

The bright flamingoes flew ; 
From morn till night he followed their flight, 

O'er plains where the tamarind grew. 
Till he saw the roofs of Caffre huts, 

And the ocean rose to view. 



HENR V • WADS IVOR TH LONGFELLO W. 109 



" At night he heard the lion roar, 

And the hyena scream, 
And the river-horse, as he crushed the reeds 

Beside some hidden stream ; 
And it passed, like a glorious roll of drums, 

Through the triumph of his dream." 

The fertility of Mr. Longfellow's mind and the 
variety of his powers were manifested in his thirty- 
sixth year, in his dramatic study, "The Spanish Stu- 
dent," which was originally published in Graham's 
Magazine, then edited, I believe, by Dr. Griswold, 
in whose possession I remember to have seen it about 
thirty years ago. The personages in "The Spanish 
Student" were the dusky antipodes of the swarthy 
figures which preceded them. If we judge— and we 
ought to— this curious production by the intention of 
its creator and the laws of its construction, it is 
beautiful. It should be read without the least 
thought of the stage, which may have been, but 
should not have been, before the mental eye of the 
author when he wrote it ; and, so read, it will be 
found radiant with poetry. Not of a passionate or 
profound kind— which it is not and should not be, 
for the plot is in no sense a tragic one— but of a kind 
that suggests the higher walks of serious poetic 
comedy. The dramatis personce are sketched with 
sufficient distinctness— as distinctly, it seems to me. 



1 1 o HENR V WADS WOU TH L ONGFELL O W. 

as those in the early comedies of Shakespeare — and 
the conversation, which is as lively and bustling as 
that of Biron and Rosaline, is suited to the speakers 
and their station in Spanish life. The dancing-girl, 
Preciosa, is a lovely creation of the poet's fancy. 
The sweetest passage in "The Spanish Student," 
which is in praise of woman, is put into the 
mouth of the lover of this same dancing-gM, Vic- 
torian : 

" What I most prize in woman 
Is her affections, not her intellect ! 
The intellect is finite ; but the affections 
Are infinite, and cannot be exhausted. 
Compare me with the great men of the earth ; 
What am I ? Why, a pigmy among giants ! 
But if thou lovest — mark me ! I say lovest, 
The greatest of thy sex excels thee not ! 
The world of the affections is thy world. 
Not that of man's ambition. In that stillness 
Which most becomes a woman, calm and holy, 
Thou sittest by the fireside of the heart. 
Feeding its flame. The element of fii'e 
Is pure. It cannot change nor hide its nature, 
But burns as brightly in a gipsy, camp 
As in a palace hall. Art thou convinced ? " 

Another tender passage drops from the lips of the 
same amorist : 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. Ill 

" I will forget her! All dear recollections 
Pressed in my heart, like flowei'S within a book, 
Shall be torn out and scattered to the winds ! 
I will forget her ! But perhaps hereafter, 
When she shall learn how heartless is the world, 
A voice within her will repeat my name. 
And she will say, ' He was indeed my friend ! ' 
Oh ! would I were a soldier, not a scholar. 
That the loud march, the deafening beat of drums. 
The shattering blast of the brass-throated trumpet, 
The din of arms, the onslaught and the storm, 
And a swift death, might make me deaf for ever 
To the upbraidmgs of this foolish heart ! " 

The soul of Music breathes out its impassioned 
sweetness in the first Act : 

SERENADE. 

Stars of the summer night! 

Far in yon azure deeps. 
Hide, hide your golden light ! 

She sleeps ! 
My lady sleeps ! 

Sleej)s ! 

Moon of the summer night ! 

Far down yon western steeps. 
Sink, sink m silver light ! 

She sleeps ! 
My lady sleeps ! 

Sleeps ! 



ri2 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 



Wind of the summer night ! 

Where yonder woodbine creeps, 
Fold, fold tby pinions light ! 

She sleeps ! 
My lady sleeps ! 

Sleeps ! 

Dreams of the summer night ! 

Tell her her lover keeps 
Watch ! while in slumbers light 

She sleeps ! 
My lady sleeps ! 

Sleeps ! 

Of course Mr. Poe did not like " The Spanish Stu- 
dent." How could he? "Its thesis is unoriginal, 
its incidents are antique, its plot is no plot, its cha- 
racters have no character — in sliort, it is little better 
than a play upon words to style it ' A Play ' at all." 
Besides, it was pilfered — not so much from the Ex- 
emplary Novels of Cervantes as from his own tragi- 
comedy, "Politian" : 

" His body is in Segovia, 
His soul is in Madrid." 

Two years after the appearance of this feeble 
shadow of "Komeo and Juliet" we had bodies of 
corporeal substance in "The Belfry of Bruges and 
Other Poems." Traces of Professor Longfellow's 
early manner as unsuccessfully put forth in "The 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 113 

Beleaguered City" were triumpliant in tlie prologue, 
"Carillon," and in "The Arrow and tlie Song," 
winged, far-flying, and, as many think,, the most 
perfect of all his smaller pieces. 

THE ARROW AND THE SONG. 

I shot an arrow into the aii>, 
It fell to earth, I knew not where; 
For, so swiftly it flew, the sight 
Could not follow it in its flight. 

I breathed a song into the air, 
It fell to earth, I knew not where ; 
For who has sight so keen and strong 
That it can follow the flight of song ? 

Long, long afterward in an oak 
I found the arrow, still unbroke ; 
And the song, from beginning to end, 
I found again in the heart of a friend. 

In the address " To a Child " and in "The Occulta- 
tion of Orion" Mr. Longfellow reached a table-land 
of imagination not before attained by his Muse. 
"The Bridge" is a manifestation of his personality, 
and of one phase of his genius that has never ceased 
to charm the great body of his readers, whom it sup- 
ports upon the broad bosom of the shining Charles, 
as it supported aforetime the heavy figure of An- 
drew Craigie, apothecary, and as it supported until 



114 HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 

lately tlie litlie and light figure of Henry Wadsworth 
Longfellow. Hear him as lie muses aloud : 

" How often, oli! liow often, 
In the days that had gone by, 
I had stood on that bridge at midnight, 
And gazed on that wave and sky ! 

" How often, oh! how often, 

I had wished that the ebbing tide 
Would beai' me away on its bosom 
O'er the ocean wild and wide, 

" For my heart was hot and restless, 
And my life was full of care. 
And the burden laid uj)on me 
Seemed greater than I could bear. 

" But now it has fallen from me. 
It is buried in the sea ; 
And only the sorrow of others 
Throws its shadow over me. 

" Yet whenever I cross the river 
On its bridge with wooden piers, 
Like the odor of brine from the ocean 
Comes the thought of other years. 

" And I think how many thousands 
Of care-encumbered men, 
Each bearing his burden of sorrow, 
Have crossed the bridge since then. 



HENRY WADS IVOR Til LONGFELLOW. 115 

' ' I see the long procession 
Still passing- to and fro, 
The young- heart hot and restless, 
And the old subdued and slow ! 

" And for ever and for ever, 
As long as the river flows, 
As long as the heart has passions, 
As long as life has woes ; 

" The moon and its broken reflection 

And its shadows shall appear, 

As the symbol of love in heaven, 

And its wavering image here." 

If the train of tliouglit wliicli lias been suggested 
here is not new, it is because no train of thought that 
embraces manlvind ever is new. It is tender, pathet- 
ic, natural, and that is enough. The lines to "The 
Driving Cloud " were Mr. Longfellow's first valuable 
contribution to our scanty store of aboriginal j^oetry 
— the forerunner of an immortal production not yet 
transmuted into limpid melody. Under the head of 
' ' Songs ' ' came eight poems, two of which were 
moulded after a fashion that Mr. Longfellow had 
now succeeded in making his own. I refer to "Sea- 
Weed" and "The Arrow and the Song" — fantasies 
wherethrough the doctrine of poetic correspondences 
works out happily and victoriously its own excuse for 
being. "The Belfry of Bruges" is a picturesque de- 



il6 HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. , 

scription of that quaint old city as beheld from the 
tower of the belfry in the market-place one morning 
in summer, accompanied by an imaginative remem- 
brance of its past history, which passes before the 
kindling eye of the poet like a court masque or 
pageant. Everything is clearly conceived and in 
orderly succession, and in no poem that he had yet 
written was the hand of the artist so firm. "Nu- 
remberg," a companion-piece in the same measure, is 
distinguished by the same precision of touch and the 
same broad excellence. There is an indescribable 
charm, a grace allied to melancholy, in "A Gleam of 
Sunshine," which is one of the few poems that refuse 
to be forgotten. "The Arsenal at SiDringfield" is 
didactic, but I cannot perceive how it could be other- 
wise than didactic and be a poem at all. A poet 
should be a poet first, but he should also be a man, 
and a man who concerns himself with the joys and 
sorrows of his fellow- creatures. There was a great 
lesson in the burnished arms at Springfield, and a 
lesser poet than the Master of Craigie House would 
either not have guessed it, or would have missed it : 

" Were half the powei* that fills the world with terror, 
Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts, 
Given to redeem the human mind from error, 
There were no need of arsenals or forts : 



HEXRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 117 

" The warrior's name would be a name abhorred! 
And every nation that should lift again 
Its hand against a brother, on its forehead 
Would wear for evermore the curse of Cain ! 

" Down the dark future, through long generations, 
The echoing sounds groAV fainter and then cease; 
And like a bell, with solemn, sweet vibrations, 

I hear once more the voice of Christ say, ' Peace ! ' 

" Peace! and no longer from its brazen portals ' 
The blast of War's great oi-gan shakes the skies ! 
But beautiful as songs of the innnortals 
The \\o\y melodies of love arise." 

Nothing could be more unlike than " The Norman 
Baron," a study of the mediaeval age, and '' Eain in 
Summer," a fresh, off-hand description of a summer 
shower at Cambridge. My feeling about the last is 
that it would have been better if it had been cast in 
a regular stanza instead of its present form, which 
strikes me as being a singular one, and that it is not 
improved by the introduction, at the close, of a higher 
element than that of simple description. The last 
three sections are poetical and imaginative, but they 
disturb, it seems to me, the harmony and unity of 
the poem. 

Not many English -waiting poets, good fathers as 
most of them were and are, have addressed poems to 
their children. Rare old Ben Jonson wrote twelve 



Il8 HENRY IVADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 



mournful lines about his first daughter, Mary, who 
died in infancy : 

" At six months' end she parted, hence, 
With safety of her innocence." ' 

Shakespeare bewailed in "King John" the loss of 
his little son Haninet. Coleridge sang a touching 
cradle-song over his poor boy Hartley in "Frost at 
Midnight"; Shelley wept bitter tears at the death 
of his son William ; Barry Cornwall celebrated the 
birth of his lovely daughter Adelaide in a delight- 
ful sonnet ; and Leigh Hunt, most melodious of all, 
rollicked about two of his children in two character- 
istic ditties, the most natural of which he inscribed 
to his son John in "A Nursery Song for a Four- Year- 
Old Rom J)." These are some of the best-known Eng- 
lish i)oets who have been inspired by children. Pro- 
fessor Longfellow distanced all but Shakespeare, and 
aj)parently without an effort, in his lines "To my 
Child." We have in it the first glimpse of the poet's 
house, and of the Washington chamber in which 
he wrote so many of his poems, and which had now 
become his daughter' s nursery : 

' ' With what a look of proud command 
Thou shakest in thy little hand 
The coral rattle with its silver bells, 
Making- a merry tune ! 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 119 

Thousands of years in Indian seas 

That coral grew, by slow degrees, 

Until some deadly and wild monsoon 

Dashed it on Coi'omandel's sand ! 

Those silver bells 

Reposed of yore, 

As shapeless ore, 

Far down in the deep-sunken wells 

Of darksome mines. 

In some obscui^e and sunless place, 

Beneath huge Chimborazo's base, 

Or Potosi's o'erhanging pines ! 

And thus for thee, O little child,. 

Through many a danger and escape, 

The tall ships passed the stormy cape ; 

For thee in foreign lands remote, 

Beneath a bvxrning, tropic clime. 

The Indian peasant, chasing the wild goat, 

Himself as swift and \yild, 

In falling, clutched the frail arbute, 

The tibres of whose shallow root, 

Uplifted from the soil, betrayed 

The silver veins beneath it laid, 

The buried treasures of the miser. Time." 

He turns from the cliilcl to tlie memory of tlie great 
Man whose feet once trod so heavily where hers glide 
so lightly : 

" Through these once solitary halls 
Thy pattering footstep falls. 



HENRY WAD SWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

The sound of thy merry voice 

Makes the old walls 

Jubilaiit, aud they rejoice 

With the joy of thy young heart, 

O'er the light of whose gladness 

No shadows of sadness 

From the sombre background of memory start. 



" Once, ah! once, Avithin these walls, 
One whom memoiy oft recalls, 
The Father of his Country, dwelt. 
And yonder meadows broad and damp 
The fires of the besieging camp 
Encircled with a burning belt. 
Up and down these echoing stairs, 
Heavy with the weight of cai-es, 
Sounded his majestic tread ; 
Yes, within this verj^ room 
Sat he in those hours of gloom, 
Weary both in heart and head. 
But what are these gi'ave thoughts to thee ? 
Out, out ! into the open air : 
Thy only dream is liberty. 
Thou carest little how or where. 
I see thee eager at thy play, 
Now shouting to the apples on the tree, 
With cheeks as round and red as they ; 
And now among the yellow stalks, 
Among the flowering shrubs and plants, 
As restless as the bee. 



HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. I2i 

Along the garden walks 

The tracks of thy small carriage-wheels I trace ; 

And see at every turn how they efface 

Whole villages of sand-roofed tents, 

That rise like golden domes 

Above the cavernous and secret homes 

Of wandering and nomadic tribes of ants. 

Ah ! cruel little Tamerlane, 

Who, with thy dreadful reign, 

Dost persecute and overwhelm 

These hapless Troglodytes of thy realm ! 

" What! tired already! with those supi)liant looks, 
And voice more beautiful than a poet's books, 
Or murmuring sound of water as it flows, 
Thou comest back to parley with repose ! 
This rustic seat in the old apple-tree, 
With its o'erhanging golden canopy 
Of leaves illuminate with autumnal hues, 
And shining with the argent light of dews, 
Shall for a season be our place of rest. 
Beneath us, like an oriole's pendent nest. 
From which the laughing birds have taken wing, 
By thee abandoned, hangs thy vacant swing. 
Dream-like the waters of the river gleam; 
A sailless vessel drops adown the stream. 
And like it, to a sea as wide and deep, 
Thou ch'iftest gently down the tides of sleep. 

" O child! O new-born denizen 
Of life's great city ! on thy head 



HEMRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

The glory of the morn is shed, 

Like a celestial beiiisoii ! 

Here at the portal thou dost stand, 

And with thy little hand 

Thou openest the mysterious gate 

Into the future's undiscovered land. 

I see its valves expand, 

As at the touch of Fate ! 

Into those realms of los^e and hate, 

Into that darkness blank and drear. 

By some prophetic feeling taught, 

I launch the bold, adventurous thought, 

Freighted with hope and fear ; 

As upon subterranean streams, 

In caverns unexplored and dark, 

Men sometimes launch a fragile bark, 

Laden with flickering fire. 

And watch its swift-receding beams. 

Until at length they disappear, 

And in the distant dark expire. 

" By what astrology of fear or hope 
Dare I to cast thy horoscope ! 
Like the new moon thy life appears; 
A little strip of silver light. 
And widening outward into night 
The shadowy disk of future years ; 
And yet upon its outer rim 
A luminous circle, faint and dim, 
And scarcely visible to us here. 
Rounds and completes the perfect sphere ; 



HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 123 



A prophecy and intimation, 
A pale and feeble adumbration. 
Of the great world of light that lies 
Behind all human destinies. 

" Ah ! if thy fate, ^yith ang-uish fraught, 
Should be to wet the dusty soil 
With the hot tears and sweat of toil, 
To struggle with imperious thought 
Until the ovei'burdened brain, 
Weary with labor, faint with pain, 
Like a jarred pendulum, retain 
Only its motion, not its power — 
Remember, in that perilous hour, 
When most afflicted and oppressed, 
From labor there shall come forth rest. " 

"The Day is Done" belongs to a class of poems 
that depend for their success upon the human ele- 
ment which they suggest or contain, and to which 
they appeal. " The Old Clock on the Stairs " is an 
illustration of what I would convey, and as good a 
one as any with which I am acquainted in the writ- 
ings of contemporary poets. The humanities, never- 
long absent from Craigie House, were present in the 
ticking of the old clock on \\\q stairs, and were chant- 
ing a lusty stave as they turned the yellow leaves of 
the old Danish song-book. What is it that they are 
trolling out in the haunted shadows of the poet's 
library ? 



124 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 



' ' Thou art stained with wine 
Scattered from hilarious goblets, 
As the leaves with the libations 
Of Olympus. 

' ' Yet dost thou recall 
Days departed, half forgotten. 
When in dreamy youth I wandered 
By the Baltic, 

"When I paused to hear 
The old ballad of King Christian 
Shouted from suburban taverns 
In the twilight. 

' ' Thou recallest bards 
Who, in solitary chambers, 
And with hearts by passion wasted. 
Wrote thy pages. 

"Thou recallest homes 
Where thy songs of love and friendship 
Made the gloomy Northern winter 
Bright as summer. 

" Once some ancient Scald, 
In his bleak, ancestral Iceland, 
Chanted staves of these old ballads 
To the Vikings. 

" Once in Elsinore, 
At the court of old King Hamlet, 
Yorick and his boon companions 
Sang these ditties. 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 125 

" Once Prince Fredei-ick's Guard 
Sang them in their smoky barracks : — 
Suddenly the Enghsh cannon 
Joined the chorus. 

"Peasants in the field, 
Sailors on the roaring ocean, 
Students, tradesmen, pale mechanics, 
All have sung them. 

*' Thou hast been their friend ; 
They, alas ! have left thee friendless ! 
Yet at least by one warm fireside 
Art thou welcome. 

"And, as swallows build 
In these wide, old-fashioned chimneys, 
So thy twittering songs shall nestle 
In my bosom— 

"Quiet, close, and warm, 
Sheltered from all molestation, 
And recalling by their voices 
Youth and travel." 

This volume introduced Mr. Longfellow in a spe- 
cies of composition in which we had not hitherto 
seen him, save in translations — the sonnet, of which 
there were three specimens here, the best, perhaps, 
being on "Dante." One feature of his poetry, and 
not the strongest, was the first which his imitators 



126 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

seized on, and sought to transfer to their own rhymes. 
I allude to his habit of comjparing one thing with an- 
other thing— an outward fact with an inward experi- 
ence, or mce mrsa. A few examples will illustrate 
what I mean : 

"Before liim, like a blood-red flag, 
The bright flamingoes flew." 

"And it passed like a glorious roll of drums 
Through the triumph of his dream." 

*' Through the closed blinds the golden sun 
Poured in a dusky beam, 
Like the celestial ladder seen 
By Jacob in his dream." 

"And the night shall be filled with music. 
And the cares that infest the day 
Shall fold their tents like the Ai'abs, 
And as silently steal away." 

It was Mr. Longfellow's fancy, not his imagination, 
which commended his verse to poetasters of both 
sexes throughout the ■world of English readers, and 
what was excellent in him — and is excellent in itself, 
when restrained within due bounds — became absurd 
in them, it was carried to such excesses. Mr. Thomas 
Buchanan Read was prodigal of comj)arisons. A de- 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 127 

serted road, for instance, sweeps in Ms verse towards 
the crowded market, 

' Like a stream without a sail." 

He muses beside this wonderful old road until he 
opines that he 

" Sees the years descend and vanish 
Like the tented wains and teams." 

He is singing about a summer shower, and, with a cer- 
tain sort of picturesqueness which is marred by in- 
congruous fancies, he sees the silvery rain, in the first 
stanza, 

"Like a long line of spears, brightly burnished and tall." 

In the second stanza it is "like cavalry fleet," and 
the wild birds listening to the raindrops are "like 
a musical school," while the rain breaks the face of 
the spring "like pebbles." Another example, and I 
have done with Mr. Read's minstrelsy : 

"The shadow of the midnight hours 
Falls like a mantle round my form ; 
And all the stars, like autumn flowers, 
Are banished by the whirling storm." 

All our minor singers imitated Mr. Longfellow, as 
the minor singers of an earlier period imitated Mr, 



128 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

Bryant, and the result was a curious medley of crude 
thought and far-fetched imagery. It was the exjieri- 
ence of Mr. Tennyson anticipated, as he has told us 
in "The Flower" : 

" Read my little fable : 
He that runs may read. 
Most can raise the flowers now, 
For all have got the seed." 

Mr. Longfellow's next venture was the gift of his 
admiring but careless friend Hawthorne. The cir- 
cumstance that led to this profuse generosity is stat- 
ed briefly in the first volume of his " American Note- 
Books," in a congeries of memoranda written be- 
tween October 24, 1838, and January 4, 1839. Yoild : 

"H. L. C heard from a French-Canadian a story 

of a young couple in Acadie. On their marriage-day 
all the men of the village were summoned to assem- 
ble in the church to hear a proclamation. When as- 
sembled they were all seized and shipped off to be 
distributed through New England, among them the 
new bridegroom. His bride set off in search of him, 
wandered about New England all her lifetime, and at 
last, when she was old, she found her bridegroom on 
his death-bed. The shock was so great that it killed 
her likewise." This forcible deportation of a whole 
people occurred in 1755, when the French, to the ex- 



HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 129 

tent of eighteen thousand souls, were seized by the 
English in the manner stated. History, which excuses 
so much, has perhaps excused the act, but humanity 
never can. It is as indefensible as the Inquisition. 

" Evangeline" disputed the palm with " The Prin- 
cess," which was published in the same year, 1847. 
The two poems are so unlike, so divergent, that no 
comparison can or should be instituted between them. 
Each shows its writer at his best as a story-teller, 
and if the mediaeval medley surpasses the modern 
pastoral in richness of coloring — and I think it does 
— it is surpassed in turn by the tender interest, the 
pathetic feeling of its younger rival. Both poems 
are curious as betraying the mental habits of their 
authors — the never-satisfied taste of one, the easily 
and permanently satisfied taste of the other. A great 
many lines have been written in and out of "The 
Princess" — the divine lyrics between the books have 
all been written in — but " Evangeline " stands to-day, 
I believe, as it was first printed. The English poet 
always quarrelled with his work ; the American poet 
never quarrelled with his work, nor with any human 
being, if he could help it. The tautologies that Poe 
noted in " The Spanish Student" are still there : 

" Never did I behold tliee so attired 
Aud garmented in beauty as to-night " ; 



13° HENRY IVADSIVORTH LONGFELLOW. 

and, worse still, this excess of lucidity : 

' ' What we need 
Is the celestial fire to change the fruit 
Into transparent crystal, bright and clear ! " 

Or, more monstrous still, for a Latinist, tlie inappro- 
priate adjective of this line in " Sand of the Desert 
in an Hour- Glass" : 

" Its unimpeded sky." 

But to return to "Evangeline," which I intended 
to analyze, but shall not. It is what the critics had 
been so long demanding and clamoring for — an Ame- 
rican poem — and it is narrated with commendable 
simplicity, and a fluency which is not so commendable. 
Poetry, as jDoetry merely, is kept in the background ; 
the descriptions, even when they ajDpear redundant, 
are subordinated to the main purpose of the poem, 
out of which they rise naturally ; the characters, if 
not clearly drawn, are distinctly indicated, and the 
landscapes through which they move are jDerfectly cha- 
racteristic of the New World. It is the French vil- 
lage of Grand- Pre which we behold ; it is the Colo- 
nial Louisiana and the remote "West — not the fairy- 
land which Campbell (who might have known bet- 
ter) imagined for bimself when he sat down in his 
study, with a bottle before him, to compose " Gertrude 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 131 

of Wyoming" — a non-existent Wyoming, with its 
shepherd swains tending their floclts on green declivi- 
ties, and skimming the lakes with light canoes, while 
lovely maidens danced in brown forests to the music 
of the flageolet ! (Certes, Tam, tlie bee was buzzin' 
in your bonnet then.) Evangeline, loving, patient, 
sorrowful maiden, has taken a permanent place 
among the heroines of English song; but whether 
the picturesque hexameters in which her story is 
told will hereafter rank among the standard mea- 
sures of the language can only be conjectured. Be- 
fore I quit this vexed question of the adai)tability of 
the hexameter to English ears I will copy here the 
substance of a review of Meri vale's translation of 
the " Iliad " into English rhymed verse, which I wrote 
for the World over twelve years ago. I ran through 
the early translators of Homer — Chapman, Ogilby, 
Hobbes — and passed lightly over the good and bad 
points of Pope, Cowper, Morrice, Wright, Sotheby, 
Newman, Lord Derby, Blackie, all of which transla- 
tions I then believed, from the data before me, had 
proved failures. Blank verse and rhyme having 
failed, what measure is there left for a translator of 
Homer ? Newman hit upon -one, or, to speak more 
reverently of that learned and accomplished man of 
letters, reasoned out one which he convinced himself 
was the great To Kalon. It resembles Chapman's, 



132 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

except that the lines do not rhyme, and that they end 
with double-syllabled words. It ought to have the 
flow of the balladj one would think, and it ought to 
have the freedom of blank verse ; but it has neither, 
being, in brief, as uncouth and barbaric as the war- 
song of a Pacific-islander. Newman' s failure brought 
Matthew Arnold out against him, and brought out Ar- 
nold's own idea of the way in which Homer should be 
translated, and the best — the only — measure in which 
Homer should be done into English. He gave some of 
the reasons why Chapman, Pope, Cowper, and New- 
man did not succeed, and some of the reasons why 
the coming translator ought to succeed, in hexame- 
ters. They are plausible but not convincing, for the 
reason which scholars like himself cannot or loill not 
see — that hexameters are foreign to the spirit of the 
English language, and are, to all but scholars and 
students in rhythm, difficult and tiresome reading. 
They have been tried over and over again, and never 
with success — never with success enough to make 
them enjoyable to the mass of readers of English 
poetry. We ought to like them, perhaps ; but we 
do not, and cannot be made to. At any rate, we 
have not been made to like them, in spite of Clough's 
"Bothie of Tober-na-'Vuolich," Longfellow's "Evan- 
geline," Kingsley's "Andromeda," and the spirited 
bits of Homer which Arnold himself has given us. 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 133 

Not to linger longer, however, on tlie generalities of 
criticism, let me pick out a passage or two of Homer 
as it has been rendered by some of the writers I 
have named, and as it is rendered by Merivale, the 
general drift of whose measure recalls that of the old 
ballads, with variations such as have not been intro- 
duced into any English version I am acquainted with, 
which variations, when not original with Merivale, 
are apparently derived from his studies of our irregu- 
lar balladists and metrists. 

One of the most famous passages in the "Iliad" 
is the conclusion of the eighth book— the descrip- 
tion of moonlight, and the comparison of the 
Grecian watch-fires to the stars. I will begin with 
Pope : 



' As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night! 
O'er heaven's clear azure spreads her sacred light, 
When not a breath disturbs the deep serene, 
And not a cloud o'ercasts the solemn scene ; 
Ai-ound her throne the vivid planets roll, 
And stars unnumbered gild the glowing pole, 
O'er the dark trees a yellower lustre shed, 
And tip with silver every mountain's head ; 
Then shine the vales, the rocks in prospect rise, 
A flood of glory bursts from all the skies; 
The conscious swains, rejoicing in the sight, 
Eye the blue vault and bless the useful light. 



1 34 HENR Y WADS WOR TH L ONGFELL W. 

So many flames before proud Ilion blaze, 

And lighten glimmering Xantlius with their rays ; 

The long reflections of the distant fires 

Gleam on the walls and tremble on the spires. 

A thousand piles the dusky horrors gild, 

And shoot a shady lustre o'er the field. 

Full fifty guards each flaming pile attend, 

Whose umbered arms, by fits, thick flashes send ; 

Loud neigh the coursers o'er their heai:)s of corn, 

And ardent warriors wait the rising morn." 

This florid and ornate passage was much extolled 
by Pope's contemporaries, and justly enough, accord- 
ing to their false poetic standard ; but judged by the 
higher standard of to-day — higher, that is, in regard 
to poetry in general, and the poetry of Homer in par- 
ticular — it would not be easy to find anything more 
radically bad as ]3oetry, and more unfaithful to the 
sense and manner of Homer. I^othing can be worse 
than the feeble Latinity of ' ' refulgent lamp erf 
night," and nothing more i)rosaic than "rocks in 
prosjDect rise," "conscious swains," "ardent war- 
riors," etc. There is nothing in Homer about gilding 
the i)ole ; nothing about the reflections of the iires 
gleaming on walls and trembling on spires ; nothing, 
in a word, that justifies the mincing elegance of Pope. 
What Homer did say in the jiassage so emasculated 
may be got at through Buckley's prose version of the 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 135 

"Iliad," where its substance remains intact, though 
lacking, of course, the rich, poetic, old-world atmos- 
phere of the original : 

" As when in heaven the stars appear very conspic- 
uous around the lucid moon, when the ether is wont 
to be without a breeze, and all the pointed rocks and 
lofty summits and groves appear ; but in heaven the 
immense ether is disclosed, and all the stars are seen, 
and the shepherd rejoices in his soul. Thus did 
many fires of the Trojans kindling then appear before 
Ilium between the ships and the stream of Xanthus. 
A thousand fires blazed with flame, and by each sat 
fifty men at the light of the blazing fire. But their 
steeds, eating white barley and oats, standing by the 
chariots, awaited beautiful- throned Aurora." 

Cowper's version is better than Pope's, but weak- 
ened by Latinity, and one or two feeble Miltonic in- 
versions. The last two lines are flat enough : 

" As when around the clear bright moon the stars 
Shine in full splendor, and the winds are hushed, 
The groves, the mountain-tops, the headlong heights 
Stand all apparent, not a vapor streaks 
The boundless blue, but ether opened wide 
All glitters, and the shepherd's heart is cheered ; 
So numerous seemed those fires the bank between 
Of Xanthus, blazing, and the fleet of Greece, 
In prospect all of Troy— a thousand fires, 
Each watched by fifty warriors seated near. 



136 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 



The steeds beside the chariots stood, their corn 
Chowingr, and waiting till the golden-throned 
Aurora should restore the light of dt y." 

Lord Derby's version is somewhat better, and New- 
man's not bad— for Newman, tliougli liis long lines 
are weakened by snch phrases as "bnrsteth" and 
" seenieth,'' and the interpolation " I say." But let 
US see how Merivale renders it : 

*' As Avhcn the stars in heaven burn round their shining 

queen 
Brilliantly, and without a breath expands the broad serene; 
And every diir and valley stands out, and headlong height; 
And breaks o'er all the lirniaiuent innueasurablc light ; 
The stars all sparkle, and the swain's heart gladdens at the 

sight : — 
So many 'twixt the galleys and Xanthus' yellow stream, 
Kindled in front of Ilium, the Trojan bale-fires gleam; 
In the plain bale-fires a thousand are burning, and by each 
In firelight glow full fifty men their limbs reclining stretch; 
And ranged beside their chariots, and numchhig pulse and 

corn, 
Their steeds await the faii'-pavilioned Goddess of the Morn." 

If the old English ballad measure is not the best 
one to render Homer in, it is, I think, better tlian 
the heroic couj^lets of Pope and the blank verse of 
C'owper. Its defect, in Merivale' s hands, is a ten- 
dency to indulge in expansion of his original, and to 



HENRY WADS IVOR 77/ LONGFELLOW. 137 

make it clearer, or, more strictly speaking, to bring it 
nearer home to us by allusions to modern customs, as 
in the instance under consideration, by th(3 use of the 
word " bale-fires," which is perfectly in keeping in 
our old ballads, but not quite in keeping in Homer. 
But let us see what Arnold makes of this x^assage in 
hexameters : 

*' So shone forth, in front of Troy, by the bed of Xanthus, 
Between that and tlie ships, the Tix)jans' numerous lires. 
In the plain there were kindled a thousand fires : by each one 
There sat fifty men in the ruddy light of the fires: 
By their chariots stood the steeds, and champed the white 

bai'lcy, 
While their masters sat by the fire, and waited for Morning." 

Arnold has written better hexameters than these, 
as I shall show by and by ; so I will say nothing of 
those just quoted, but pass on to another version of 
this passage — the best that I have yet seen. It is by 
one who possesses many qualities indispensable to 
the future translator of Homer — Tennyson.: 

" As when in heaven the stars about the moon 
Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid, 
And every height comes out, and jutting peak 
And valley, and the immeasurable heavens 
Break open to their iiigliest, and all the stars 
Shine, and the shepherd gladdens in his heart: 



138 HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 

So many a fire between the ships and sti'eam 
Of Xanthus blazed before the towers of Troy, 
A thousand on the plain ; and close by each 
Sat fifty in the blaze of burning fire ; 
And, champing golden grain, the horses stood 
Hard by their chariots, waiting for the dawn." 

Pope nowhere appears to more advantage than in 
the interview between Hector and Andromache, es- 
pecially where he describes the child's fright at the 
helmet of his father. He exercised all his artistic in- 
genuity in writing the passage below, as may be seen 
by the fac-simile of a page of it, made from the 
existing MS. of the rongh draft in the British ]\fu- 
seum, and to be found in some editions of Disraeli's 
" Curiosities of Literature " : 

" Thus having spoke, the illustrious chief of Troy 
Stretched his fond arms to clasp the lovely boy. 
The babe clung crying to his nurse's breast, 
Scared at the dazzling helm and nodding crest. 
With secret pleasure each fond parent smiled. 
And Hector hasted to relieve his child : 
The glittering terrors from his brows vmbound, 
And placed the beaming helmet on tlie ground, 
Then kissed the child, and, lifting high in air, 
Thus to the gods prefei'red a father's prayer." 

This is Pope at his best, I think, and very pretty 
writing it is. Very different is the version of Chap- 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 139 

man, whose rough and careless lines remind one of 
the vigorous sketches of the old masters : 

' ' This said, he reached to take his son ; who of his arms afraid, 
And then the horse-hair plume-, with which he was so over- 
laid. 
Nodded so horribly, he dinged back to his nurse and cried. 
Laughter affected his great sire, who doffed and laid aside 
His fearful helm, that on the earth cast round about it light ; 
Then took and kissed his loving son; and (balancing his 

weight 
In dancing him) these loving vows to living Jove he used, 
And all the other bench of gods. " 

As I have quoted nothing yet from Newman, the 
reader, if unacquainted with his Homer, may like to 
see what he makes out of this pretty little bit of do- 
mestic life, which is as fresh and natural to-day as it 
was three thousand years ago : 

" Thus saying, gallant Hector stretched his arms toward his 

infant ; 
But back into the bosom of the nurse with dapper girdle 
The child recoiled with wailing, scared by his dear father's 

aspect. 
In terror dazzled to behold the brass and crest of horse-hair 
Which, from the helmet's topmost ridge, terrific o'er him 

nodded. 
Then did his tender father laugh, and laughed his queenly 

mother, 



I40 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

And gallant Hector instantly beneath his chin the helmet 
Unfastened ; so upon the grovmd he laid it, all resplendent, 
Then poised his little son aloft, and dandled him and kissed 

him, 
And raised a prayer to Jupiter and other gods immortal." 

More to my taste than either of these renderings is 
Merivale's, which contains a specimen of his varia- 
tions of the common ballad measure in the short line 
sandwiched into his first couplet, which rhymes, as 
will be perceived, with the middle of the last line of 
the couplet : 

" This said, bright-crested Hector reached forth to take his child; 

The infant viewed him with affright, 

And, shrilly screaming at the sight, in his nurse's arms re- 
coiled, 

Scared by the brazen armor, and the helmet's horse-hair 
plume 

Nodding above the lofty crest and waving all its gloom. 

Smiled sire and reverend mother ; but Hector from his head 

The helmet loosed, and on the ground the shining trophy laid ; 

Then kissed the child and tossed him, and to his bosom pressed. 

And thus almighty Jove in prayer and all the gods addressed." 

The i^assage immediately preceding this, in which 
Hector reiDlies to his wife, who has endeavored to 
persuade him not to expose his life as he has done, 
is pathetically rendered by Merivale, but not near 
so finely as by Arnold, who stUl fails, however, to 



HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 141 



make us admire his hexameters, grave and well sus- 
tained as we cheerfully admit them to be : 

" Woman, I too take thought for this; but then I bethink me 
What the Trojan men and Trojan women might murmur, 
If like a coward I skulked behind, apart from the battle. 
Nor would my own heart let me — my heart, which has liid me 

be valiant 
Always, and always fighting among the first of the Trojans, 
Busy for Priam's fame and my own, in spite of the future. 
For that day will come, my soul is assured of its coming, 
It will come, when sacred Troy shall go to destruction — 
Troy, and warlike Priam too, and the people of Priam. 
And yet not that grief, which then will be, of the Trojans 
Moves me so much— not Hecuba's grief, nor Priam my father's, 
Nor my brethren's, many and brave, who then will be lying 
In the bloody dust under the feet of the foemen — 
As thy grief, when, in tears, some brazen-coated Achaian 
Shall transport thee away, and the day of thy freedom be ended. 
Then, perhaps, thou shalt work at the loom of another, in 

Argos, 
Or bear pails to the well of Messeis, or Hypereia, 
Sorely against thy will, by strong Necessity's order. 
And some man may say, as he looks and sees thy tears falling: 
See, the wife of Hector, that great pre-eminent captain 
Of the horsemen of Troy, in the day they fought for their city. 
So some man will say ; and then thy grief will redouble 
At the want of a man like me, to save thee from bondage. 
But let me be dead, and the earth be mounded above me, 
Ere I hear thy cries, and thy captivity told of." 



142 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

There is a strong flavor of Homer here ; but if Lord 
Derby and Merivale interjDret the feeling of the 
opening line correctly, the phrase "woman" is un- 
necessarily harsh. Nor are we satisfied to have 
Priam characterized by the epithet "warlike," w^hen 
the original makes him "armed with good ashen 
spear," which Newman translates "aslien-si3eared," 
and Merivale "prince of the ashen spear," And 
this, by the way, reminds me that Arnold follows 
Pope in making the masters of the horses, and not 
the horses themselves, watch for the morning. His 
reason for the change is ingenious, but overstrained — 
as much so, I think, as Euskin's comment on the 
epithet "life-giving," which follows Helen's mention 
of her brothers as alive, when they were in reality 
dead. "The poet," says Ruskin, "has to si3eak of 
the earth in sadness ; but he will not let that sadness 
change his thought of it. No ; though Castor and 
Pollux be dead, yet the earth is our mother still — 
fruitful, life-giving." "This," Arnold remarks, and 
I must apply the censure to him as well as to Euskin 
— "this is just a specimen of that sort of application 
of modern sentiment to the ancients against which a 
student who wishes to feel the ancients truly cannot 
too resolutely defend himself." 

The passage just alluded to (it is in the third book 
of the " Iliad ") has been very nobly translated by Dr. 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW: 143 

Hawtrey, late provost of Eton, and, as it is short, I 
will give it here : 

" Clearly the rest I behold of the dark-eyed sons of Achaia; 

Known to me well are the faces of all ; their names I remem- 
ber; 

Two, two only remam, whom I see not among the com- 
mandei's, 

Kastor, fleet in the car; Polyduktus, brave with the cestus — 

Own dear brethren of mine: one parent loved us as infants. 

Are they not here, in the host, frojii the shores of loved Lake- 
daimon. 

Or, though they came with the rest in ships that bound 
through the waters, 

Dare they not enter the fight or stand in tlie Council of 
Heroes, 

All for fear of the shame and the taunts my crime has awa- 
kened ? 

So said she — they long since in Earth's soft arms were rej)os- 

There, in their own dear land, their fatherland, Lakedaimon." 

This is, perhaps, the best specimen of hexameters 
in the language (it is certainly the best I have ever 
seen), and I do not say that Homer, so rendered, 
conld not be read with considerable pleasure. But, 
unfortunately, Homer has not been so rendered, and 
cannot, I am persuaded, be so rendered throughout, 
for reasons which exist in the very structure of our 



144 HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 

language, and which will readily suggest themselves 
to the students thereof. Let me see now what Meri- 
vale makes of the passage in his fluent rhymes : 

" ' And all the rest behold I, the Greeks with glancing eyes, 
And well can I remember all their names and histories. 
But two discern I cannot — two princes have I missed : 
Castor, the quellerof the steed, and Pollux, stout of fist; 
Two children of one mother, and brothers both to me. 
What ! have they not with the others sailed from the land 

beyond the sea ? 
Or swam they in their galleys from Lacedsemon's shore, 
But now, by keen reproaches stung, 
And hate and scorn upon me flung, join they the fight no 

more ? ' 
So spake she; but those heroes there, on the Spartan 

strand, 
Already fruitful Earth confined in their dear native land." 

From this long digression about what Lord Derby 
called the "pestilent heresy" of the hexameter I 
return to "Evangeline," which seemed likely at one 
time to have a long line of followers, the first of 
which, "The Bothie of Tober-na-Yuolich," was only 
a year after it, and the second, "Andromeda," only 
ten years more. Later experiments of this kind have 
been made by Mr. E. C. Stedman in his translations 
from Theocritus, Homer, and ^schylus ; by Mr. 
Bayard Taylor in his "Home Pastorals"; by Mr. 



HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 145 

Arthur J. Munby in his "Dorothy" (though that, by 
the way, is in pentameters) ; and by Mr. Paul Pastnor 
in "Lora." If I dared to prophesy it would be that 
the hexameter will never attain such currency in Eng- 
lish as it has attained in German in Vpss's Homer 
and in Goethe's "Hermann und Dorothea," which is 
the forerunner of all similar and later productions 
in the same school, beginning with "Evangeline" 
and ending at present with "Dorothy." 

What impresses me most strongly while I read 
Mr. Longfellow is the extent of his poetic sym- 
pathy, and the ease witli which he passes from one 
class of subjects to another. His instinct is sure in 
his choice of all his subjects, and his perception of 
their poetic capacities never at fault. They translate 
themselves readily into his language, and he clothes 
tliem in their singing-robes when the spirit moves 
him. 

He was a very rapid writer, all things consider- 
ed ; for, while literature in a certain sense was his 
profession, the business of his life was to be Pro- 
fessor of Languages and Belles-Letters at Harvard. 
" Evangeline" was succeeded in 1845 by " The Poets 
of Europe," a large and scholarly contribution to 
English literature, of which Mr. Longfellow was the 
editor, nnd which contained specimens of European 
poets in ten different languages, representing the 



146 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

labors of uj)wards of one liundred translators, includ- 
ing himself. Four years later lie published "Kav- 
anagh," which had no plot to speak of, though its 
sketches of character were bright and amusing, and 
its glimpses of New England life enjoyable. "The 
Seaside and the Fireside" came next (1850), then 
"The Golden Legend" (1851), and then "The Song 
of Hiawatha" (1855), all of which added to his re- 
putation. There are twenty-three poems in " The 
Seaside and the Fireside," no two of which are 
alike, though all authenticate the cunning hand by 
which they were wrought. The most important 
poem in the collection is ' ' The Building of the 
Sliij)." I may be singular in my opinion, but 
my oi)inion nevertheless is that "The Building of 
the Ship" is a better poem than "The Song of 
the Bell." I think its theme is more adapted to 
poetic treatment than Schiller's theme — partly, no 
doubt, because it is more tangible to the imagina- 
tion, and capable, therefore, of more definite presen- 
tation before the eye of the mind ; but largely, I 
suppose, because its associations are not attached to 
so many memories as cluster about the ringing of a 
bell. Its unity is in its self-concentration. 

" The Golden Legend" carries us back to the Mid- 
dle Ages, of which we had transitory gleams in the 
earlier writings of Mr. LongfelloAV, The poetic 



HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 147 

atmosphere of that remote period — lovelier to our 
Gothic imaginations than the more distant past of 
Greece and Rome — envelops a lovely story, which 
turns, like the story of "Evangeline," npon the love 
and devotion of woman, which here are happily re- 
warded. The figure of the ijeasant girl Elsie, who 
determines to sacrifice her life to restore her 
prince to the sanity of hax:>piness, is worthy of a 
high place in any i)oet's dream of fair woman — as 
high a place as that filled by Joan of Arc, 

' ' Or her who knew that Love can vanquish Death, 
Who kneeUng, with one ai-m about her king, 
Drew forth the poison with her balmy breath, 
Sweet as new buds in Spring." 

The charm of the poem, apart from its poetry, is 
the thorough and easy scholarship of the poet, who 
contrives to conceal the evidences of his reading— an 
art which few poets have possessed in an equal de- 
gree, which Moore did not possess at all, but which 
was masterly in Scott and eminent in Sliakespeare. 
If the opinion of an unlettered man is worth any- 
thing — and it cannot be worth much — the miracle- 
play of "The Nativity" is conceived in the very 
spirit of those archaic entertainments Avliich cleric 
pens devised for the edification of the laity. So far 
as I know, it had no prototype in modern English 



148 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

poetry, and lias had no successor worthy of it, except 
Mr. Swinburne's '^ Masque of Queen Bersabe." Mr. 
Ruskin, whose opinions are often sound in spite of 
the extravagance of his language, detects one phase 
of the poem in the fourth volume of his "Mod- 
ern Painters," and states it with unusual brevity: 
"Longfellow, in 'The Golden Legend,' has entered 
more closely into the temper of the Monk, for good 
and evil, than ever yet theological ^^Titer or historian, 
though they may have given their life's labor to the 
analysis." 

Poets are distinguished from writers of verse not 
only by superiority of genius but by superiority of 
knowledge. The one has insight, the other outsight 
merely. The versifier gropes about in search of po- 
etical subjects, while the poet goes to them directly, 
instinctively, and always finds them, often where 
others had sought for them in vain. That there was, 
or might be, a poetic element in the American Indian 
several ambitious American poets had persuaded 
themselves, and, so persuaded, had striven to quicken 
their sluggish numbers with its creative energies. Ro- 
bert C. Sands and James Wallis Eastburn wrote to- 
gether the ponderous poem of " Yamoyden " ; Charles 
Fenno Hoffman wrote "A Vigil of Faith" ; Seba 
Smith, a "Powhatan" ; Alfred B. Street, a " Fron- 
tenac"; and others, I dare say, other aboriginal epics 



HE'N'RY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. ' 149 

whose names are forgotten. They were unanimous in 
one thing — they failed to interest their readers. The 
reason of this was not far to seek and find, we can see, 
since success has been achieved, but it demanded a vis- 
ion which was not theirs— tlie vision and the facul- 
ty divine — and which, it seemed, only one American 
poet had in its fulness. This man saw that the In- 
dian himself, as he moves duskily through our his- 
tory, was not in himself a i^oetic hero. But he also 
saw that he had a poetic side to him, and that if it 
existed anywhere it existed in his legends. That he 
had many legends, and that they were remarkably 
primitive, was well known. They were brought to 
light by the late Mr. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who 
heard of their existence among the Odjibwa Nation, 
inhabiting the region about Lake Superior in 1822. 
Sj)ecimens of these unique traditions were published 
by him in his ' ' Travels in the Central Portions of the 
Mississippi Valley" (1825) and his "Narrative of 
the Expedition to Itasca Lake " (1834); but they were 
not given to the world in their entirety until 1839, 
in his "Algic Researches." They were as good as 
manuscript (as the bibliographers say) during the 
next sixteen years, though one American poet had 
mastered them thoroughly. This was Mr. Longfel- 
low, who turned this Indian Edda, as he happily calls 
it, into "The Song of Hiawatha." The immediate 



150 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 



and immense success of tliis poem, and the increase 
of rei)ntation wliicli it hurried upon the writer, re- 
called the early years of the present century, when 
Scott and Byron were sure of thousands of readers, 
and thousands of pounds, when it pleased them to 
rattle off a metrical romance — a " Ladj^ of the 
Lake," a ''Marmion," or a "Lara." "The Song of 
Hiawatha" was read by all classes, who at once 
found themselves interested in the era of flint- 
arrow heads, earthen pots, and skin clothes, and its 
elemental inhabitants, who, dead centuries before, if 
they ever existed, are now living the everlasting life 
of Poetry. It passed through many editions in the 
United States, in England, and elsewhere in the Old 
World in other languages. Its value as a contribu- 
tion to mythology and ethnology was universally ad- 
mitted, but the fitness of its form was questioned, as 
all new forms are sure to be ; for the form was new to 
most readers, though not to scholars in the literatures 
of northern Europe. Mr. Longfellow's unscholarly 
admirers declared that it was oiiginal with him. No, 
his enemies answered, he has borrowed it from the 
Finnish epic, "The Kalevala." The quarrel, which 
was a pretty one while it lasted, was stimulated by 
critical paragraphists — who are never happy except 
when they are hectoring each other — but nobody else 
cared a button about it. The novel singularity of 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 151 



the body of this Indian Edda led to innnmerable 
parodies, but to nothing serious that I remember, 
unless Doesticks is to be considered seriously ; this 
circumstance I take to be a silent verdict against 
its permanency— even against its adoption— in Eng- 
lish versification. That the poetry of Professor Long- 
fellow has changed much in the last twenty years I 
do not perceive, except that it has grown graver and 
more meditative in its purpose. Its technical excel- 
lence has steadily increased, until what was once arti- 
fice has become Art. Professor Longfellow has held 
his own against all English- writing poets, and in 
no walk of poetry so positively as in that of telling a 
story. In an age of story-tellers he stands at their 
head — Master of many scholars— not only in the nar- 
rative poems that I have mentioned, but in the lesser 
stories included in his "Tales of a Wayside Inn," to 
which the literatures of the whole world have lavishly 
contributed. He preceded by several years the au- 
thor of "The Earthly Paradise" and artistic wall- 
papers, who has no abiding sense of the value of 
time, and not the shadow of a suspicion that there 
may be too much of a good thing. I admire Mr. 
Morris — no one more — but I would rather praise than 
read his long narratives in verse. Which is but an- 
otlier way of saying that I prefer short poems to long 
ones. About the only piece of criticism that Poe 



IS 2 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

ever wrote to which I can assent without qualifica- 
tion is, that long poems are mistakes. A poem pro- 
per should iDroduce a unity of impression, which can 
be obtained only within a reasonable time ; it should 
never provoke the reader into closing the book. This 
may be destructive criticism, but I am inclined to 
think there is something in it, although it is disre- 
spectful to the memory of Milton. A Poem should be 
read at a single sitting. Any of Shakespeare's great 
Tragedies can be read at a single sitting, but "Para- 
dise Lost" cannot. There must go to the reading 
of, that grandiose epic as many sittings as there are 
books. One suffices for "Conius" or "Samson Ago- 
nistes." Any of Professor Longfellow's stories, long 
or short, can be read without rising from the chair. 
As he had always shown good taste, it was a fore- 
gone conclusion that he would delight us with his 
"Tales of a Wayside Inn.'' Every old tale there- 
in w^as worth a new version, even " The Falcon of Sir 
Fedrigo,'' which young Barry Cornwall pursued 
when Master Longfellow was at school. Mr. Long- 
fellow's method of telling a story will comjoare favor- 
ably with the method of any English story-telling 
poet from the days of Chaucer. His heroic couplets 
are as facile as those of Hunt and Keats, from whose 
affectations and mannerisms he is free. They suggest 
the heroics of no other poet, American or English, 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 153 



and, unlike some of his early verses, are witliont man- 
nerism. They as snrely attain a pure poetic style as 
the prose of Hawthorne attains a pure prose style. 

The most distinctive of Mr. Longfellow's poems are 
probably those which he entitled "Birds of Pas- 
sage," and prophetically, for they have flown into 
many lands and into all hearts. What first impresses 
me in reading them is the mnltifarious reading of 
their writer, who appeared to have no favorite au- 
thors, but to read for the delight that he took in read- 
ing. He had the art of finding unwritten poems in the 
most out-of-the-way books and in even every-day oc- 
currences. When the Duke of Wellington died he 
hymned his departure in " The Warden of the Cinque 
Ports," which the populace preferred to the Lau- 
reate's scholarly Ode. His good friend Hawthorne 
went before him, and he embalmed his memory and 
his unfinished romance in imperishable verse : 

" I only hear above his place of i-est 
Their tender undertone, 
The infinite longings of a troubled breast, 
The voice so like his own. 

" There in seclusion and remote from men 
The wizard hand lies cold, 
Which at its topmost speed let fall the pen, 
And left the tale half told. 



154 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

" All! who shall lift that wand of magic j)ower. 
And the lost clew regain? 
The unfinished window in Aladdin's tower 
Unfinished must remain ! " 

Charles Sumner died, Ms dear friend of many long 
years, and ever liis admirer, and lie bewailed him as 
tenderly and sadly as the young Manrique bewailed 
his father : 

" Were a star quenched on high, 
For ages would its light, 
Still travelling downwai'd from the sky, 
Shine on our mortal sight. 

' ' So, when a great man dies, 
For years beyond our ken 
The light he leaves behind him lies 
Upon the paths of men." 

I have been looking over a few of Mr. Longfellow' s 
notes to me, and have concluded to insert them here 
in the order in which they were written, elucidating 
them w^here I can : 

" Camb., Jan. 8, 1878. 

"Dear Mr. Stoddard: Please accept my thanks 
for your kind letter, for the poems you send me 
and those you refer to in Grriswold. 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 155 



"I have not liis 'Female Poets' at hand, but 
shall lose no time in getting a coi^y and examining 
the poems you mention. 

"Your tribute to Lincoln is beautiful and very just. 
I will keep it carefully out of sight tiU it appears in 
the magazine. 

"As to your estimate of Mrs. Stoddard's literary 
abilities, I do not wonder at it. You do not rate 
them a bit too high ; and if her writings have not 
found that swift recognition which they merit, I hope 
it will not discourage her. Often the best things win 
their way slowly, but are pretty sure of being found 
out sooner or later. 

" Some of your volumes I have. The rest I shall 
find in the libraries, here or in Boston. I thank you 
for pointing out the pieces that will be of use to me. 
I have frequently been obliged to omit poems of me- 
rit because I could not ascertain their localities. 

' ' I was very glad to renew my acquaintance with 
you at the pleasant Atlantic Dinner, and am, with 
great regard, 

" Yours very truly, 

"Henry W. Longfellow." 

" Camb., Jan. 14, 1878. 

"Dear Mr. Stoddard: The three handsome vol- 
umes of Griswold have arrived safely, and I hasten to 
thank you for your great kindness in sending them. 
Though I have not yet had time to examine them 
carefully, yet I have glanced at them here and there, 
and see that they will be of much use to me. 



156 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 



"I wish I had possessed a copy of the 'Female 
Poets ' sooner. I should not then have missed those 
three striking poems by Mrs. Stoddard — ' The Bull- 
Fight,' 'El Capitano,' and 'On the Campagna,' 
whose absence in 'Poems of Places' I much re- 
gret. 

' ' With renewed thanks for your careful kind- 
ness, 

" Yours very truly, 

"Henry W. Longfellow." 

" Camb., April 28, 1878. 

" Dear Mr. Stoddard : I am much obliged to you 
for the ' Earlier Poems ' of Mrs. Browning, and for 
your fine Ode, 'Hospes Civitatis,' which is strong 
and beautiful. 

" I am sorry that it comes to me too late for India ; 
but it is in season for China and the Mle, and I am 
very glad to have it. Those regions will be the richer 
for it. Thanks. 

" In great haste, 

' ' Yours very truly, 

" Henry W. Longfellow." 

The following note refers to a poem which I had 
the honor of reading before the young gentlemen of 
Harvard : 

"Camb., June 30, 1878. 

" Dear Mr. Stoddard : I was very sorry and 
much disapiJoiuted not to see you and Mrs. Stod- 



HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 157 

dard when you were here last week. But it was 
such a busy week that I could not go to town in 
search of you, and probably should not have found 
you if I had gone. 

" I failed also to hear you deliver your poem. 
Being delayed by visitors, and thinking the poem 
would follow the oration, I arrived too late. 

' ' The next best thing to hearing the poem is read- 
ing it. Thanks for the opportunity of doing so thus 
early. It is both vigorous and beautiful. The war- 
like ages you have described with a tumult of verse 
finely adapted to the theme. 

" Fifty years ago, before the same society, Bryant 
recited his poem, 'The Ages,' in Sj)enserian stanzas. 
On the year of his death you take up the theme once 
more, and paint an Historic Picture in the same 
metre. Was it accident or design ? I know not ; but 
whichever it was, the idea is very felicitous. I con- 
gratulate you on your success. 

" I was glad to see Mr. Gilford. He made some 
capital sketches, with which I think you will be 
pleased. 

" Yours very truly, 

" Heney W. Longfellow." 

"CAMB.,Sept. 8, 1878. 

" Deak Mr. Stoddaed : Your sketch is more than 
satisfactory, and the frank and easy style in which it 
is written adds to its attraction. 

" I return it to the editor to-day, with one or two 
corrections in the genealogy, etc. 



158 HENRY WADSIVORTH LONGFELLOW. 

" Please correct also what you say of translations 
of Homer in hexameters. I have two : one by Her- 
schel, 1866, and another by Cochrane, 1867. Whe- 
ther these preceded or followed Arnold' s suggestion 
I cannot say, as I have not his book at hand. 

" Please tell me by j)ostal-card where Harley River 
is. I wish to have it in ' Poems of Places,' but do not 
find it in the Gazetteer. 

"Yours, with many thanks, 

" Henry W. Longfellow. 

"P.S. — One omission I notice. You say nothing 
of my translation of the 'Divina Commedia,' pub- 
lished in 1867, which perhaps it would be well to 
notice, if only to correct an error in regard to its 
composition. 

"In the 'Life and Letters of Ticknor' (ii. 479) it 
is stated that I was engaged upon it ' over five-and- 
twenty years.' 

' ' In Mr. Richardson' s ' Primer of American Litera- 
ture,' p. b^, the time is magnified into ' more than 
thirty years.' 

" The fact is, I was engaged upon it, as I find by 
dates in the MS., just two years (Feb. 20, 1862-Feb. 
4, 1864)." 

I have omitted one note from its proper place, 
but I shall publish it after the following hasty re- 
view of Mr. Longfellow's "Keramos" in the Inde- 
pendent of May 16, 1878, to which it refers, and 
which I had entirely forgotten : 



HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 159 

"About the beginning of the present century a 
German poet, who had written well in many direc- 
tions, reached the great audience of his countrymen 
by a song — if it may be called such — which has been 
popular ever since and in all lands. I allude to Schil- 
ler and his ' Song of the Bell,' which has been the 
model that other poets have kept before them when 
writing upon similar themes. Mr. Longfellow, for 
example, followed the shining trail of that divine 
singer of labor in ' The Building of the Ship '—a beau- 
tiful craft which was launched upon the wide sea of 
literature twenty-eight years ago. 

" Mr, Thomas Buchanan Read, who began his ca- 
reer as an imitator of Mr. Longfellow and ended as 
an imitator of everybody, struck a more earthly key 
in ' The Brickmaker ' ; and Mr. Samuel Ferguson, an 
Irish poet, smote a lusty lyric in his ' Forging of the 
Anchor.' Akin to these productions was ' The Bells ' 
of Poe, the sound of whose verse in that marvellous 
epical ditty echoes and re-echoes the sense, and con- 
veys the exact impression that he intended. 

"There must be something very attractive in this 
class of subjects, or so practical a poet and so clear 
a thinker as Mr. Longfellow would not have return- 
ed to it, as he has just done in ' Keramos and Other 
Poems.' He has excelled himself in the poem which 
gives this volume its name, and, if any of the Eng- 
lish versions of ' The Song of the Bell ' do it justice 
(which is scarcely probable), he has at least equalled 
Schiller. 'Keramos' is a series of artistic concep- 
tions, which are thoroughly and perfectly executed. 



i6o HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

The work of the potter grows under his shaping 
hands, while he sings a refrain which perpetually 
changes and deepens, and which exhausts the inner 
meaning of his handiwork : 

" ' Where more is meant than meets the ear.' 

" The poet is borne along on the wings of his sing- 
ing until he reaches and passes the world' s great pot- 
tery x:)laces — Delft, Saintes (where he sees Palissy 
burning his furniture to keep his furnace going), 
and the studios of Gubbio, Xanto, Georgio, and 
Lucca della Robbia. The treasures of Etruria are 
restored : 

' ' ' Vases and urns, and bas-reliefs. 
Memorials of forgotten griefs, 
Or records of lieroic deeds^ — 
Of demigods and mighty claiefs.' 

The swift wings of his genius transport him (the 
potter working and singing meanwhile) to Egypt, 
where he has on either bank of the Nile huge w^a- 
ter-wheels, 

" ' Belted with jars and dripping weeds,' 

and where he has visions of the old EgyiDtian deities 
— Ammon, Osiris, and Isis — crowned and veiled. 

' ' ' The sacred Ibis, and the Sphinx ; 
Bracelets with blue enamelled links ; 
The Scarabee in emerald mailed, 
Or spreadmg wide his funeral wings ; 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. i6l 

Lamps that perchauce their night-watch kept 

O'er Cleopatra while she slept— 

All plundered from the tombs of kings.' 

Bird-like he flies over tlie Ganges and over the 
Himalaj'as to the Central Flowery Kingdom, where 
he hovers over the town of King-te-tching, where 
three thousand furnaces are burning — a great grove 
of chimneys, which whirls its leaves of porcelain to 
all the markets of the w^orld. He sees things beau- 
tiful (as those almond-eyed artists understand beau- 
ty) and things useful : 

" ' The willow pattern, that we knew 
In childhood, with its bridge of blue 
Leading to unknown thoroughfares; 
The solitary man who stares 
At the white river flowing through 
Its arches, the fantastic trees 
And wild perspective of the view.' 

He sees the Tower of Porcelain, and the grandeur 
and beauty of the landscapes of Japan, which are so 
fantastically reproduced in its pottery -w^ork. Pic- 
ture after picture i)asses before his eyes and before 
ours — thanks to his beautiful gift of poetry — in a 
succession of exquisite melodies, which flow on and 
along to a music of their own making. 

"The second section of the volume, 'Birds of 
Passage,' opens wath 'The Herons of Elmwood,' 
w^hicli everybody knows is the residence of the poet 
Lowell, a stately old mansion haunted with scholarly 
memories. The herons are called upon to sing of the 



l62 HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 

air, of the wild delight of the wings that uphold 
them, the rapture of flight through the mists that 
enfold them, of the landscapes below and the splen- 
dor of light above, and are told to ask the poet if the 
songs of the Troubadours and Minnesingers are sweet- 
er than theirs : 

" 'And if yours are sweeter and wilder and better.' 

Say to him at his gate that some one hath lingered 
there and sends him a friendly gTeeting : 

' ' ' That many aii other hath done the same, 

Though not by a sound was the silence broken ; 
The surest pledge of a deatliless name 

Is the silent homage of thoughts unspoken.' 

" This charming poem refutes the notion that there 
is no genuine friendship and intellectual recognition 
among jDoets. Mr. Longfellow has always been ready 
to stretch forth the hand of good-fellowship toward 
his fellow-singers, and no previous volume of his 
shows such a readiness as the one before us, which 
contains, in addition to this poem, a sonnet address- 
ed to Tennyson, wherein his mastery is proclaimed. 
We must quote its terzettes, which are admirable : 

" ' Not of the howling dervishes of song, 

Who craze the brain with their delirious dance, 
Art thou, O sweet historian of the heart ! 
Therefore to thee the laurel-leaves belong. 
To thee oui* love and oiu* allegiance. 
For thy allegiance to the iDoet's art.' 

Could anything be more characteristic of the present 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 163 



school of spasmodic poetry than that phrase 'howling 
dervishes ' % Another proof of the friendship of men 
of genius is the sonnet entitled 'The Three Silences' 
(which are those of speech, desire, and thought), ad- 
dressed to the poet Whittier. We can recall no tri- 
bute to the Quaker singer which is at once so Just 
and so discriminating as the conclusion of this noble 
sonnet : 

*" O thou, whose daily life anticipates 

The life to come, and in whose thought and word 
The spiritual world preponderates, 
Hermit of Amesbury ! thou too hast heard 
Voices and melodies from beyond the gates, 
And speakest only when thy soul is stirred.' 

"There are sixteen 'Birds of Passage' here, and 
they have flown from many lands. ' A Dutch Pic- 
ture ' tells the story of its nativity in its title, which, 
however, gives no hint of the Flemish landscapes and 
gardens and interiors that are painted therein. It is 
thoroughly in keeping and admirable as a gallery 
of figure-pieces. ' Castles in Spain ' is still more pic- 
turesque and delightful, exhausting, as it does,^ a 
world of historic, personal, and architectural associa- 
tions, completing the circle of Spanish poetry which 
Mr. Longfellow began with his 'Coplas de Manrique,' 
continued in ' The Spanish Student,' and has closed 
in this felicitous production. From Spain he passes 
to Italy in ' Vittoria Colonna,' a melodious monody 
on the great wife of the Marchese di Pescara. Here 
is an exquisite stanza : 



1 64 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

" ' For deatli, that breaks the marriage band 
In others, only closer pressed 
The wedding-ring uj)on her hand 
And closer locked and barred her breast.' 

The memory of this noble lady, whom the Italians 
call Divine, is further honored among the sonnets of 
Michael Angelo, of which Mr. Longfellow has trans- 
lated seven, two of which are addressed to her. 
' The Revenge of Rain-in-the-Face ' recalls the young- 
er Mr, Longfellow of tlie hexameters ' To the Driv- 
ing Cloud ' and the brook-like measure of ' The 
Song of Hiawatha.' It celebrates better than any 
other poem that we have seen the destruction of the 
White Chief with the yellow hair and all his men in 
the fatal snare into which Sitting Bull entraj)ped 
them. 

"The three following i^oems are on French and 
Spanish themes, the most spirited being ' A Ballad of 
the French Fleet.' The time of the last is 1746 ; the 
occasion the threatening of Boston by a French fleet, 
which is scattered and sunk by a great October storm, 
that was prayed for in the Old South Church by 
the narrator of the incident, Mr. Thomas Price, whose 
stern Puritan character, as shown in the ballad, is 
strongly drawn. ' The Leap of Roushan Beg ' is 
a vivid seizure of the tumultuous life of a great bandit 
chief, and of his perilous escape from his pursuers. 
He had a wonderful horse, over whom he had the 
most perfect control, and who obeyed his wisli as he 
obeyed his own will, leaping with him across a yawn- 
ing mountain chasm thirty feet wide and landing 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 165 

him safely on the further side. Here is a magnifi- 
cent stanza of this great poem : 

" ' Roushan's tasselled cap of red 
Trembled not upon his head, 

Careless sat he and upright ; 
Neither hand nor bridle shook, 
Nor his head he turned to look, 
As he galloped out of sight.' 

" 'Haroun-al-Raschid' is one of those apologues 
which the Eastern poets are so fond of relating, and 
of which Himt's ' Abou-Ben-Adhem ' is perhaps the 
best example. The lesson which "the poet teaches the 
great Calii^h is the old, sad lesson of mortality : 

" ' O thou who choosest for thy share 

The world, and what the world calls fair, 

' ' ' Take all that it can give or lend, 
But know that death is at the end ! ' 

"'The Three Kings' is a fresh and picturesque 
handling of the beautiful old tradition of the Three 
Wise Kings of the East (sometimes called the Three 
Kings of Cologne), Melchior, Gaspar, and Baltasar, 
and how they followed the star to Bethlehem, The 
little song beginning ' Stay, stay at home, my heart, 
and rest,' is the best lyric that Mr. Longfellow has 
written since ' The Rainy Day,' which sang itself into 
the world' s remembrance nearly forty years ago. The 
child was, indeed, the father of the man ; but in the 
case of Mr. Longfellow the father is much greater 



1 66 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

and broader and wiser than tlie child gave promise 
of being. 

" The hero of ' The White Czar ' is Peter the Great, 
who figures in the popular songs of the Russian 
people as Batyuska (Father dear) and Gosicdar (sov- 
ereign). His spirit has arisen, and declares that the 
ships of his successors, which he thinks are his ships, 
shall sail to the Pillars of Hercules — a prophecy 
which may yet be fulfilled. There is a martial ring- 
to the poem which is very eifective, and which closes 
this section of the book like the blast of a trumpet. 

" ' A Book of Sonnets' contains twenty-two of Mr. 
Longfellow' s exercises in that ' scanty plot of ground.' 
Mr. Longfellow, like Mr. Bryant, showed no ai:>tness 
for writing sonnets in the earlier collections of his 
verse ; but of late years he has cultivated this charm- 
ing specialty with great care, and with perfect success. 
He has mastered all the laws which govern the body 
and soul of the legitimate Italian sonnet, and is to- 
day the finest living sonneteer. He does not attempt 
the- grandiose and the magnificent, but confines his 
genius within the range of its symi3athies, which are 
generoiis, and tender, and spiritual thoughts and 
things, with the serious mysteries of life and death 
and the world to come. If I were called upon to 
name the most imaginative poem that Mr. Longfel- 
low has ever written, I should select the four sonnets 
which celebrate ' Two Rivers ' — the rivers being those 
of Yesterday and To-morrow. There is a largeness 
and a strangeness in these sonnets which defies an- 
alysis, and is very remarkable. 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 167 

"The last section of the vohime is devoted to 
' Translations,' of which there are fifteen. In the 
first two of these — 'Virgil's First Eclogue' and 
'Ovid in Exile' — Mr. Longfellow returns to his old 
love, the hexameter, which rewards his affection 
better than 'Evangeline.' I am inclined to think his 
last hexameters the best yet written by an Ameri- 
can i3oet. I still regard the hexameter, however, as 
an experiment in English poetry, and I doubt its ul- 
timate triumph. There are, in addition to those I 
have named, three translations from the French and 
two from the German, and translations of Michael 
Angelo's sonnets, and one of his canzones. Mr. Long- 
fellow is easily the master of all translators into Eng- 
lish poetry, and the specimens of his powers here are 
among the best that he has given us." 

"Camb., May 19, 1878. 

" Dear Mr. Stoddard : Accept my thanks for 
your generous notice of ' Keramos ' in the Indejpen- 
dent, which I have read with pride and pleasure. 

"I am never indifferent, and never i^retend to be, 
to what people say or think of my books. They are 
my children, and I like to have them liked. 

"When I send you the volume of ' Poems of Places ' 
containing China, which I will do as soon as it is pub- 
lished, I hope you will not think I have taken too 
many of your 'Chinese Songs.' 

"For these, also, I thank you. They have helped 
me greatly in that part — " 

The hiatus which occurs here (made probably by 



l68 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

the j)ilfering fingers of some autograph-lmnter) re- 
minds me of the hiatus at the nnfinished conclusion 
of " Thealma and Clearchus," and the quaint words 
of honest old Izaak Walton, who edited John Chalk- 
hill's MSS.: '•''And here the author died, and I hope 
the reader will he sorry.'''' 

Before this reaches the reader the June number 
of the Century magazine will no doubt have fallen 
under his eye, and he will have read the following 
note from the pen of its editor, Mr. Richard Watson 
Gilder. It was dated at Shanklin, Isle of Wight, 
October 1, 1879. Shanklin is a more famous locality 
than Mr. Gilder remembered when he was there, for 
it Avas there that John Keats and Charles Armitage 
Brown resided after the former had finished his 
"Eve of St. Agnes," and it was there that he wrote 
his tragedy of "Otho the Great," and no doubt pro- 
jected his ' ' King Stephen ' ' : 

' ' Just look at this group of thatched cottages ! 
The one on the right is a library where we go for 
books. In the middle is the Crab Inn. Do you see 
what looks like a pile of stones to the right of it ? 
That is a fountain for the use of the public. I read 
some verses painted there on a piece of tin, and said 
to myself : ' That must be from Longfellow.' I found 
afterwards that they were written by him, by request, 
when he was here, some years ago : 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 169 

" ' O Traveller, stay thy weary feet ; 

Drink of this fountain pure and sweet ; 

It flows for rich and x^oor the same. 
Then g'o thy way, remembering still 
The wayside well beneath the hill, 

The cup of water in His name.' " 

From a manuscript copy of tliis little inscription I 
learn that it was written on July 21, 1868, and that 
Mr. Longfellow afterwards substituted "cool" for 
"pure" in the second line. 

When I entered my office on the morning of Fri- 
day, March 24, I was handed a despatch from Bos- 
ton which had been waiting for me, and which an- 
nounced the death of Mr. Longfellow, and was asked 
to write an editorial upon it. As it was near noon, 
the editorial was necessarily brief. In the evening 
of the same day the editor of the Tribune asked me 
to furnish him with a column letter for the next 
morning's paper. I did the best I could under the 
circumstances. Another gentleman did much better 
under the same circumstances, for about the time 
that I was writing in New York my good friend 
Mr. Charles Gr. Whiting was writing in Sjoringfield, 
in the offi.ce of the Republican^ and writing after his 
day's work was thought to be finished, hurrying for 
dear life to have his editorial in the next morning's 
paper. The next day he wrote another editorial, 



I70 HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 



either for the paper of the following day, or the day 
after. I have printed only one communication. It 
is from a young lady who prefers to be known only 
by her initials. I believe I need say no more, or 
need only say that the address which will follow 
this communication w^as read by me on the fore- 
noon of April 2 ; that the letters by which that is 
followed were written, at my request, by singular 
good friends of mine; and that the verse w^hich 
closes all wi'ote itself in six hours on the evening 
and in the night and morning of the day of Mr. 
Longfellow's interment. 

And here the author ends, and I hope the 
reader will be sorry. 



(Mail and Express Editorial.) 

On the midnight of the twenty-sixth day after the 
celebration of his seventy-fifth birthday throughout 
the civilized world the most fortunate and honored 
of all the English poets since Shakesjoeare, Henry 
Wadsworth Longfellow, began to enter into the sha- 
dow of the Invisible World. He was surrounded by 
those he loved best, dear children, hosts of worshij)- 
ping friends, the great memory of Washington, and 
the best wishes of all good men and women. No 
passing away could be more felicitous than his. The 
haste with which this paragraph must be written jn-e- 
vents any — the least allusion to the many splendid 
intellectual achievements of this largely-gifted man, 
who illustrated all known literatures in the spirit 
of their original creators. He was the first Ameri. 
can to introduce his countrymen to the treasure- 
house of German letters, to the abundant wealth of 
Spanish and Portuguese song and fable, to the awful 
kingdom of the stern old Florentine and his gentle 
Roman Master, to the glorious domain of the Golden 
Legend, the primitive poetry of Hiawatha and his 
beloved Minnehaha, to the grim Puritan ancestry of 



172 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

tlie New England of which we are so humbly proud, 
to the universe of human emotion and tenderness. 
Craigie House is henceforth doubly haunted. Two 
gracious Presences are now pacing its shining cham- 
bers, and the race is poorer from their departure. 
Master of sovran spirits. — A-ee atque Vale. 

March 24. 



(Tribune Editorial.) 
To THE Editor op the Tribune : 

Sir : 1 made my first acquaintance with the poetry 
of Mr. Longfellow at a much later period than I 
should have done, several years after I was familiar 
with the noble verse of his early master — the mas- 
ter of all of us — Bryant, and about the time that Mr. 
Edgar Allan Poe, his bitterest enemy, published " The 
Raven." It was in a cheap reprint of the "Voices 
of the Night," by the Harpers — a double-column 
Imaged pami^hlet, dated somewhere in the fourth de- 
cade of the j)i'esent century. It was, as nearly as I 
can recollect, in my twentieth year, which would be 
nearly at the time of the Langley-Matthews republi- 
cation of the Poetical Works of Miss Elizabeth Bar- 
rett Barrett. I read it carelessly, as young i^eojile 
are apt to read metrical writing, and I did not under- 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 173 

stand it as I might have done. I could not iDerceive 
the delicate grace of the correspondences in the 
"Prelude" — that airy fantasy in which substance 
and shadow, body and soul, play at hide-and-seek, 
reminding one of 

' ' The swan that on St. Mary's Lake 
Floats double, swau and shadow.'^ 

Whether the peculiar structure of this poem origi- 
nated with Mr. Longfellow, or was borrowed by him 
from some romantic German master — tJhland, per- 
haps, or Heine — I am not scholar enough to know. 
It is a very dangerous form of composition, -as the 
readers of "The Reaper and the Flowers," "The 
Beleaguered City," and "Midnight Mass for the Dy- 
ing Year" could not fail to discover. How exquisite 
it could be, in more skilful hands, they felt a few 
years later when they read "The Rainy Day," 
"Maidenhood," and "The Arrow and the Song" — 
which last perfect lyric has always flown into the 
hearts of poets, making its divinest flight into the 
heart of the greatest of her sex — Mrs. Browning. It 
is the finest bay -leaf in the crown of young Mr. Long- 
fellow that he was learned enough, while a professor 
at Bowdoin, to transmute into his own charming Eng- 
lish the El Dorado of several Continental literatures 
— the weighty solemnity of Don Jorge Manrique, the 



174 HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 



tender loveliness of Lope de Vega, tlie Jieavenliness 
of De Aldana and De Medrano, and, later still, tlie 
sacred Vision of tlie " Celestial Pilot" in the "Pur- 
gatorio," and the blessedness of the holy Beatrice — 
'■^ Manibus o date lilia plenis.^'^ 

Lighter and darker strains succeeded, from Charles 
d' Orleans, from the Anglo-Saxon, from stout Danish 
Ewald, and from Tiedge, Miiller, Ilhland, and Sa- 
ils. Professor Longfellow transplanted the choicest 
flowers of the German Tempe into his (and Bryant's) 
own green land of groves. All this while poor Edgar 
Allan, unhappy, unsuccessful, with a sick wife, and a 
demon struggling in his shattered soul, was reviling 
Mr. Longfellow and other plagiarists in the Mirror, 
the Broadway Journal^ and every other periodical 
into which he could thrust his envenomed stylus, 
and Avas exhausting his jDurchased praises of certain 
literary ladies, who shall be nameless, since they have 
long since joined our vanished race of Sapphos and 
Estelles. And all this while his sovran in song and 
the virtues forgave him. " I never blamed him," he 
wrote in substance, in a note w^liich I have mislaid, 
<' for he was suffering and sorrowful, and he thought 
me prosperous and happy." It was so with all of us, 
O my brothers of the genus irritahile — we were en- 
vious of him, we were jealous of his su^Derior powers 
and place in the world's regard, and he heeded it not ; 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 175 

lie knew beforehand all our calamities, how we begin 
in gladness (as the great Master sings) and end — so 
many of us end — in madness. Pardon the least of 
thy followers, loving and illustrious Si^irit. 

' ' For there shall come a mightier blast, 
There shall be a darker day ; 
And the stars, from heaven downcast, 
Like red leaves be swept away ! 
Kyrie eleison ! 
Christe eleison ! " 

But all this, though heartfelt, is from my present 
purpose, which is simply to jot down the little — it 
is not much— that I know of Henry Wadsworth 
Longfellow. I paid him my first visit between thir- 
ty and forty years ago. It was a bright, hot sum- 
mer day, and he was living with his family, his 
stately wife and his gentle children, in a house 
which he had at Nahant. It was, as I remember, 
perched upon a bold and j)recipitous cliff, abrupt 
and steep to the slip of sand which separated it 
from the tumbling wall of surf, which was the wild- 
est that I, almost sea-born, had ever seen. I was the 
obscurest of the obscure ; he the most gracious of 
men. With me was my good friend Fields, who 
has passed before us into the Silent Land, and my 
living friend, if he will let me call him such, Whip- 



176 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

pie. We walked, the Kniglit and his squires and 
pages, across some fields, and tlie youngest of the 
last asked him if lie remembered a certain image of 
Bryant's, but h«? had forgotten it. "It can be 
found," I said, "in 'After a Tempest,' " and I quot- 
ed the lines I liad in mind, for I never forgot my 
Bryant : 

' And darted up and down the butterfly, 
That seemed a living blossom in the air.' " 

He nodded his head like one who was well i)leased. 
"He made a note of that," said James Thomas, as 
we sauntered slowly behind. We went to dinner 
soon afterward. I sipi^ed a little Lafitte, which I 
never liked, and the host told of his fancy for ab- 
surd books, some of which he had with him. I re- 
collect that in one the hero bolted the door — and then 
bolted himself ! I dare say he had a case full of Co- 
lumbiads, Fredoniads, Powhatans, Yamoydens, Mil- 
ford Bards, Alonzo Lewises, and other dead and 
gone old Dunces. "Rest, perturbed spirits, rest!" 
Some time later — I have no memory for dates — I 
called upon him, on another summer day, at Cam- 
bridge. I walked up the stately entrance to Craigie 
House, and was at once admitted, was shown into an 
ante-room lined with books, and, the family being 
at dinner, a glass of wine was sent to me until the 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. ^^ 177 

liost could leave his guests. In a moment I was seat- 
ed at his table, as I had lately been on the seashore, 
surrounded by his children, and a gossiping chat 
went round. What was it about ? I could sooner 
recall what song the Sirens sung to Ulysses, what dit- 
ty Marsyas piped before Apollo, what tune Achilles 
whirled out of his distaff, or what courtly dance 
Charmian trod before the Herculean Roman and the 
serpent of old Nile, than that midsummer medley 
over the walnuts and the wine. I dare say it was 
something like this : 

" Care, like a dun, 
Lurks at tlie gate ; 
Let tlie dog wait." 

Or more like this, in esse., if not in posse : 

' ' Forty times over let Michaelmas pass, 
Grizzling hair the brain doth clear ; 

Then you know a boy is an ass. 

Then you know the worth of a lass. 
Once you have come to Forty Year." 

I met, or rather saw, Mr. Longfellow thrice again. 
Once at the Old Corner Bookstore haunted with 
memories of Ticknor, Fields, Hawthorne, Holmes, 
Whittier, Emerson, Sumner, and Taylor — more glo- 
rious memories of those immortal boys, William 
Makei^eace and Charles, and, I fear, dwindling 



178 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

memories of several youngsters in the A's, and 
H's, and J's, and L's — but of tliis meeting only tlie 
shadow of a gracious Presence remains. The next 
time we met was at the Brunswick, where some, 
winter forenoon lang syne we gathered to do hon- 
or to the first of Friends, singer of New England's 
legendary lore, a good gray head which all men 
knew — (hail, John Greenleaf Whittier !) — and where 
the Poet of "The Golden Legend" welcomed me 
with his clear eye and reverent beard, the Nestor 
then of our bards — Nestor, but younger than Bryant 
by over twelve years. The third and last time I 
heard of, but saw not, Longfellow, who came stealing 
into Sanders Theatre on a hot June forenoon to hear 
a certain rhax3sodist essay a j)oem upon History be- 
fore the young scholars of his beloved Alma Mater, 
but came late, for the sly wag of a poet contrived to 
go before the learned divine Avho strove for an hour 
and a half to reconcile our Science and his Canadian 
Orthodoxy. Futile j)ropounder of Paradoxes, I pit- 
ied thee ! Two dear to me saw the venerable figure 
gliding in and out, but the man he so honored beheld 
him not, nor ever again. 

I might have seen Longfellow two weeks ago, but I 
had not the heart to disturb his age. I remembered 
the melancholy death of our great Commander of the 
"Flood of Years," and broke not his peace. Gene- 



HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 179 

rally si^eaking, I come to pmise Caesar, not to bury 
liim. What more need I say of tlie Man and his 
Work % Only what he said of our dear friend Haw- 
thorne : 

" All ! who sliall lift that wand of magic power 
And the lost clew regain ? 
The unfinished window in Aladdin's tower 
Unfinished must remain T' 

New York, March 24, 1882. 



THE POET LOIN^GFELLOW DEAD. 

(Springfield Republican.) 

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the best-beloved 
of American jDoets, and the most widely read not 
only of American but of all living poets, died on 
Friday afternoon at his home in Cambridge, having 
survived not quite a month the hearty celebration all 
over his country of his seventy-fifth birthday. Mr. 
Longfellow has been growing physically feebler with 
the infirmities of age for the last two or three years, 
and finally yielded to an attack of peritonitis of 
several days' duration. Thus closes a life wholly 
valuable and beneficent in all its relations, and one 



l8o HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 

of the early forces of our literature, that half a cen- 
tury ago was active, and yet was vital still in his last 
year of life. 

Longfellow was born of a sturdy English ancestry, 
the old Puritan stock, unblent with other strains, 
and notable from its first entrance in the New World. 
The first of the name in this country was William 
Longfellow, who came from the English Hampshire in 
1651 and settled in Newbury, where he married a sis- 
ter of Chief -Justice Sewall, and who was wrecked 
with a boat's crew of the unlucky expedition of Sir 
William PhiiDps on its retreat from Quebec in 1690. 
His widow was left with six children, and one of 
them, named Stephen (after Stephen Dummer, grand- 
father of Mrs. Anne Sewall Longfellow), became a 
blacksmith. A recent novelist has made a college 
professor shrink with rei)ulsion from a young man he 
.has warmly befriended, when he learns the man's 
father was a blacksmith. But Longfellow the poet 
had nothing of this snobbery, and must have thought 
of his grandfather's grandfather when he wrote of 
the village blacksmith, who 

" — looks tlie "wliole world in the face, 
For he owes not any man." 

The blacksmith Longfellow married well, a minis- 
ter's daughter of Marshfield, Abigail Thompson ; and 



HENRY WADSIVORTH LONGFELLOW. i8l 

their son Stephen, who graduated from Harvard in 
1742, became the schoolmaster of Portland, Me. , and 
there remained through life, serving the community 
in many offices, such as town clerk, register of pro- 
bate, etc. His oldest son, another Stephen, was im- 
portant, too, in Gorliam, where he lived, and whence 
he went eight years as representative in the General 
Court of Massachusetts ; moreover, he was justice of 
the Court of Common Pleas in Portland from 1797 to 
1811. His son Stephen, the poet's father, was a dis- 
tinguished lawyer, a member of the Hartford conven- 
tion of New England federal disunionists in 1814, and 
member of the Eighteenth Congress. He married 
Zilpah, daughter of Gen. Peleg Wadsworth, and 
through her ancestry it was that Longfellow traced 
his descent to John Alden and Priscilla Mullins of 
the Mayflower. The i^oet was born February 27, 
1807, in a large, square wooden house still standing 
in Portland, and was named Henry Wadsworth after 
his mother's brother, a lieutenant in the United 
States navy, who three years before in the harbor of 
Tripoli had given his life to his country in an at- 
temi^t to destroy the Barbary pirate flotilla. This is 
the record of the race from Avhich Longfellow the 
poet sprang to crown it with fame — a steady, seri- 
ous, conscientious race, of more than average ability, 
so that their fellow-citizens commonly found it wise 



l82 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

to emxDloy them in public affairs ; with a finer strain 
about them, too, than about their neighbors, for we 
find that one Longfellow after another is noted as 
"gentle." The poet is a true practical as well as 
moral inheritor from his forefathers, for there have 
been no vagaries in his life, but a faithful and con- 
tinuous service of his fellows ; but the poetic gift, 
which we find no trace of among them, must have 
come from the mother, where the characterizing 
quality of genius is so like to dwell. Thus we 
come to the career of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 
In a home where honor and fortune and accom- 
plishment were fortunately united the poet grew 
up. He began rhyming early, and the few poems of 
his boyhood that have been given to the world — 
only two or three besides those he has included in 
his collected "Poems" — testify to the inevitable 
course of his poetic bent. He was a poet at thirteen, 
and might as well have stopped breathing as rhym- 
ing. He was quick in all his intellectual processes, 
and entered Bowdoin College at the age of fourteen, 
in the same class with his elder brother, Stephen. 
This class, that of 1825, was the most distinguished 
one that was ever graduated from Bowdoin, and 
preserves the fame of the college. Its great stars 
are Longfellow and Hawthorne, but John S. C. 
Abbott, George B. Cheever, and Jonathan Cilley, 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 183 



the brilliant politician wlio fell in a meaningless 
duel with Graves of Kentucky, were also members ; 
Franklin Pierce, afterward President, was in the class 
preceding. Longfellow excelled in all studies, and 
easily took class honors, graduating second among 
thirty-seven with an English oration on "Native 
Writers." This, together with other literary work 
of his during his college life, led to his election to 
the newly established chair of modern languages and 
literature in less than a year after his graduation, 
and when he was but nineteen years old. He left his 
father' slaw-ofHce for Europe, and spent three years 
and a half in study of the principal European lan- 
guages ; and probably an equal term of study never 
resulted in more excellent general preparation. In a 
year from his entering upon his duties as professor 
his reputation was a magnet to attract students to 
Brunswick. In 1833 his first published work appear- 
ed, "Coplas de Manrique," a translation of the la- 
ment of a young Spanish knight on his father's 
death, and one of the noblest of elegiac poems, wliich 
was ]prefaced by an essay on the moral and devo- 
tional poetry of Spain. During this period he con- 
tributed to the North American Review, and pub- 
lished his "Outre-Mer," a book of travel. In 1835 
Mr, Longfellow was called to succeed G-eorge Tick- 
nor as Professor of Modern Languages and Liter- 



l84 HENR V WADS IVOR TH LONGFELLO JF. 

ature in Harvard College, and lie again visited 
tlie Old AVorld, especially to study the languages 
of northern Europe. Daring this residence abroad 
his wife, the daughter of Judge Barrett Potter, of 
Portland, whom he had married in 1831, died at 
Rotterdam, and he finished his work under the bur- 
den of this first great sorrow. The shadow of it 
tinges the images of "Hyperion," the most exqui- 
site of i3rose-poems, which was published in 1839. 
Mr. Longfellow entered upon his duties as professor 
at Harvard in 1836, and held the position for seven- 
teen years, resigning then to live a X3urely literary 
life. He made another visit to Europe in 1842, and 
in 1845 i^ublished "The Poets and Poetry of Eu- 
rope," one of the finest literary cyclopaedias, not only 
in the choice and the translation of representative 
poetry, but in biographical and critical comment, 
that has ever been made. 

In 1843 Mr. Longfellow married again, his bride 
being Frances Elizabeth Appleton (the Mary Ash- 
burton of "Hyperion"), daughter of Nathan Ap- 
pleton, of Boston, and bought the Craigie House 
at Cambridge, the Washington headquarters, Avhere 
Edward Everett and Jared Sparks had lived be- 
fore him. Here he has lived ever since ; here his 
children, two sons and three daughters, were born ; 
and here his lovely wife met her sudden and dread- 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 185 

ful death by fire, her flowing sleeves catcliing flame 
from a lamp in an evening entertainment with the 
children. For her the poet remained a mourner to 
his death. The years continued to be fruitful in 
literary work, his volumes of verse following each 
other at short intervals, the most noted coming thus : 
•'Voices of the mght," 1839; "The Spanish Stu- 
dent," 1843; "Evangeline," 1847; "The Golden Le- 
gend," 1851 ; " The Song of Hiawatha," 1855 ; " The 
Courtship of Miles Standish," 1858; "Tales of a 
Wayside Inn," 1863; "The New England Tra- 
gedies," 1868; "The Divine Tragedy," 1872; and 
"Aftermath," in 1873. Notwithstanding the sad 
finality of this last title, the poet was fortunately 
wrong, for he has plucked from his hearth and fields 
since then " The Hanging of the Crane," 1874 ; "The 
Masque of Pandora," 1875 ; " Keramos," 1878 ; and 
"Ultima Thule," 1880 — even since this last we have 
had some worthy grain from him, not to speak of 
his admirable editorial work in the selection of 
"Poems of Places," which in thirty-one volumes 
comprises a wonderful variety of fine verse. Within 
a year, also, a suj^erb subscription edition of all his 
poetical works has been issued in this country 
and England, illustrated by the principal artists of 
America. 
Mr. Longfellow has received abundant honors in 



1 86 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

his own country and abroad : Harvard made him 
LL.D. in 1859, and both Oxford and Cambridge gave 
him the degree of D.C.L. on his latest visit to Eng- 
land and the Continent, in 1868-9. Bat his true hon- 
ors have been tlie adoption of his poems into many 
other literatures ; all the languages of Europe, and 
some of Asia, have given his verse a new public in some 
degree, and "Evangeline," "Hiawatha,"' "The Gold- 
en Legend," " The Spanish Student" esi)ecially have 
been made familiar. The sale in America of Long- 
fellow's works during the first sixteen years of his au- 
thorship numbered 325,550 copies, 293,000 of which 
were looetical and 32,550 prose. Since then no one has 
taken the trouble to compute, but the popularity of 
Longfellow, far from waning, has steadily increased. 
No other poet of to-day, it is safe to say, has reached 
anything like the number of readers, or touched so 
universally the chords of human sympathy, as Long- 
fellow has. All this time he has remained a modest, 
noble, sweet -hearted gentleman, untouched by vani- 
ty, clear of pretension, certain of his mission ; a cen- 
tre of interest in the literature of America, and to the 
literary men and women of all countries who visit 
America ; loved in thousands of households where he 
must remain unknown excei)t by his verse ; and an 
unending influence for beauty in life, and all the sur- 
roundings of life. 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 187 

HIS QUALITY AS POET. 

Longfellow, in the foreign estimation, holds the 
highest place among all the names of our literature. 
He was one of the first to catch the attention of Eng- 
lish critics, and they have clung to him as to a sheet- 
anchor in the overwhelming rush of American writers 
since. They are fond of calling him "America's 
greatest literary son," because such an attribution 
would restrict our literature to a certain level of ex- 
cellence which without doubt has been far exceeded 
by others of our authors. This has occasioned a per- 
ceptible reaction among home critics, and i)erhax)s 
caused them to depreciate the real merit of Longfel- 
low. It will be agreed that he is not a poet of the 
first, or even of the second, order. He cannot rank 
with Emerson, or with Tennyson and Browning. 
Not the exalted treasure of celestial thought, not the 
dramatic power of intense x^assions, not the mystic 
subtlety of refined ideals, is his.. But the chords of 
daily human experience, the level beauty of common 
life, the sense of content and of grief, the imaginative 
picturing of legend and allegory — these he knew well. 
He was never false in a word or a form of words. 
His lyre sang true every note, whether in major or 
minor keys. All humanity responds to its music, 
and that music is exquisite. There is a great variety 



l88 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

in his work, yet he has not written anything without 
the charm that indicates poetry. He has never been 
a sloven in his verse ; while at the same time he has 
never wandered in search of mechanical elaboration, 
as the fashion has been since Swinburne scared the 
whole guild of English writers by his exhaustive 
gymnastics with the entire resources of the language. 
Without any fantastic devices of rhythm and metre, 
he never failed in fitting his form to his thought, and 
is justly to be called a master in the mechanism of 
poesy. The hexameters of "Evangeline," the tro- 
chaics of " Hiawatha," the blank verse of " The JN'ew 
England Tragedies '' and "Christus," owe their charm 
to their fitness to the burdens they bear. "Hiawa- 
tha," for instance, although its metre is the same as 
that of the Finnish epic " Kalevala," is as close an 
echo of the movement of Indian song as could be at- 
tained in verse — at times it is like an inspiration of 
the prairies and forests which are the scenes of the 
legends. And while the tremendous artifice of Swin- 
burne will inevitably pall on the ear, and finally sink 
into the abyss of half -forgotten curiosities, Longfel- 
low's pure and simple melody will live in perennial 
freshness, because it is sweet, unaffected, genuine, 
and, beyond all, because it conveys noble messages 
instead of ignoble. 
Mr. Longfellow had a true and high poetic i^ur- 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 189 

pose, which he fulfilled. He was not an enthusiast 
for any one cause, but he had his aim fixed on the 
great family, to reach the feeling of men and women, 
ay, and children, so that they should find his verses 
household words, inspired with encouragement in 
urgent need, touched with sympathy in daily expe- 
rience, and satisfying witli consolation in defeat and 
sorrow. He is often called the ]3oet of the common- 
place, and this is not an unjust characterization, ex- 
cept as the critic's animus makes it so. Life is com- 
monplace, even its worst and best features are con- 
stantly reproducing themselves, and it has been 
Longfellow' s gift and glory to unite his verse to so 
many various phases of our experience, to associate 
his words with our i)leasures and our griefs. The 
"Voices of the Night" have sounded in our ears, 
the "Psalm of Life'' has come to our rescue repeat- 
edly ; even if it be sometimes recited shallowly in 
jest, it is always inspiriting to say : 

" Let us, then, be up and doing, 
With a heart foi* any fate ; 
Still achieving, still pursuing, 
Learn to labor and to wait." 

Is not this a worthy pilotage for life ? Time would 
fail to recall the poems wherein such help as this has 



190 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

been afforded his fellows by this poet. And where 
the higher fancy is stimulated, who offers freer- wing- 
ed carriage than he in the wonderful music of ' ' San- 
dalphon, the 'Angel of Prayer' " ? — when 

" Serene in tlie rapturous throng, 
Unmoved by the rush of the song, 

With eyes unimpassioned and slow, 
Among the dead angels the deathless 
Sandalphon stands listening breathless 

To sounds that ascend from below." 

And the judgment of Lowell stands unimpeached on 
the poem of the Acadian maiden — 

" that rare, tender, virgin-like pastoral ' Evangeline,' 

That's not ancient or modern ; its place is apart 
Where Time has no sway, in the realm of jiure Art. 
'Tis a shrine of retreat from earth's hubbub aiid strife, 
As quiet and chaste as the author's own life." 

Longfellow was such a translator as a poet would 
wish to have. A Grerman or Swedish or Si)anish iDoem 
in his hands became an English poem. But he was 
not successful in rei3roducing Dante. It is an evi- 
dence of his superiority to Jealousy that he regard- 
ed Dr. Parsons as a better translator of Dante than 
himself, and once said that there was more of the 
great Italian in Parsons' s lines on a biist of Dante 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 191 

than in all his own version of the " Divina Comme- 
dia." 

Longfellow was not peculiarly an American poet, 
although he turned his attention to American themes. 
His was — as the English said in the day when Sydney 
Smith wanted to know who read an American book, 
and when Lowell' s AjdoUo declared that — 

" Oui- literature suits each whisper and motion 
To what will be thought of it over the ocean " 

— an English mind, with the culture of Europe mould- 
ing its utterances. He never lacked the essential mo- 
ral sympathy with America, yet that sympathy never 
became with him a llaming fire as with Whittier, or 
a rapier-edge as with Lowell ; nor did he have that 
grand sweep of external nature which set aside Bry- 
ant as the embodiment of the American scene, or the 
inimitable brilliancy that marks Holmes so far in ad- 
vance of contemporary "^ngland, or the shrewd union 
of Yankee and orient genius that revealed a gospel in 
Emerson. The scarcity of Longfellow's anti-slavery 
and patriotic poems proves this lack of absolute Ame- 
ricanism in the humanitarian aspect of his verse. But 
he was emphatically a universal people's poet, and 
gained a fame that will not fade so long as English 
is sjDoken — an immortality of the good, the true, and 
the beautiful. 



192 HENRY W A DSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 



Ill I he i)()iut of clijiracter Longfellow possesses liis 
finest strength. His soul was as clean as a cliiUVs 
through his whole life, and yet nowhere devoid of 
manly strength and I'ellowship. The work he did is 
the transcript of his nature to an extraordinary de- 
gree. V\\\\\ inspiring purity, and rebuking gross- 
ness of life, like Arthur in his Round Table, was 
Longfellow. This has been a common characteristic 
of all our elder j^oets : of Bryant—'' the master of us 
all," as Stoddard calls him— of Emerson, AVhittier, 
Holmes, Lcnvell, Bayard Taylor, Parsons. These have 
not only avoided coarseness and open sensuality, but 
they have not borne that insinuation of evil which is 
so common among the younger writers of the day. 
Tlu^ same decadence is more noticeable, and far lower, 
in England than here. From Tennyson to Swinburne, 
from Browning to Dante Rossetti, is a great descent. 
And in the next younger poets we behold an ari-ay 
of boys trying verbal gymnastics in rondeaux, bal- 
lades, etc. In this country there is as yet less ar- 
tifice, but there is also less sign of any genius at 
all. 

There arise in our poetical horizon no poetic stars 
of great magnitude. We have an abundance of men 
and women \vho, sometimes strongly, sometimes dain- 
tily, strike the lyre of song, but it is a grave question 
whether our first poetic era be not now at an end, and 



HENRY WADSWORTJl LONGFELLOW. l()% 

its successor not yet dawned. The spontaneous note 
is lacking among our songsters. Tliore is a good deal 
of fine singing, but it is singing tliat has l^een learn- 
ed in school, and very imi>errectly understood. It 
would be invidious to mention the names of the 
youngest men who may sudd<uily outburst in somc;- 
thing new and worthy. There are yet those who 
survive to set a great example : Holmes and Whit- 
tier, and their juniors, Lowell and Stoddard, and 
Parsons, who writes too little for a poet of so fine 
quality, and who rests his fame securely on his 
translation of Dante, whi(;h still engages his labors. 
Stedman has sunk the bard in the critic of late — to 
tlie great advantage of criticism ; Aldrich and IIow- 
ells and Lathrop have become novelists ; Boyle 
O'Reilly has allowed the editor to wreck the poet; 
and Walt Whitman stands alone — ^great, incompara- 
ble, and unfoUowed. The score or more of younger 
men seem given over to fantasies and humors, and 
poisoned by egotism. This last fault seems hopeless. 
What can be done with a lot of youth who regard 
their personal feelings as tlie supreme subj(;ct of their 
verse, and drag their morbid notions into every phase 
of thought, study of outer nature, or picture of 
human life? How free from this dragging i)er- 
sonality was Longfellow — how far above; tliis low 
self -consciousness, even in his deepest emotional 



194 HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 

poems ! He never became the centre of the poetic 
thought, for he was greater than his sole experi- 
ence. 



AN EVENING IN THE OLD CRAIGflE HOUSE. 

To THE Editor of the Teibfjste : 

Sir : No face was better known or loved in Cam- 
bridge (alas ! that we must say loas) than the genial 
face of America's best-known poet, Longfellow, with 
its silvery crown of radiant white hair. His brown 
overcoat, too, was as well known and almost as his- 
torical, though for a far different reason, as the gray 
redingote of the first Napoleon. But all the world 
has not been to Cambridge (though the Cantabrigians 
seem to think otherwise), and iDerhaps an account of 
an evening with the poet may pass over some ground 
hitherto untravelled. 

It was in the winter of 1880 that I had the pleasure 
of first seeing Longfellow in his own home. I was a 
stranger in Cambridge, but there is nothing more 
charming and delightful than Cambridge hospitality. 
In the old Craigie Mansion on Brattle Street used to 
be free-hearted hospitality, and that hospitalifcy re- 
ceived a fresh lease of life when the poet took up his 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 195 

home there. I had been in Cambridge only a few 
weeks when with two friends I was invited to dine 
with Mr. Longfellow and spend the evening ; the in- 
vitation was not for a dinner-party, bnt for a purely 
informal meal, and was all the more welcome. It 
was a moonlight night when we left our home and 
walked down Brattle Street facing the Charles ; as 
we entered the gate the old mansion stood trans- 
figured in the moonlight, the river gleamed silver 
white, the sheltering row of bare lilac bushes had a 
spectral effect, which was enhanced by the two tall 
poplars, bare and straight, standing like sentinels in 
the quiet moonlight. But when we mounted the 
steps, rang the bell of the old door with its quaint 
brass knocker, and stepped inside the broad hall, 
there was nothing unreal or unsubstantial in our 
welcome. The bell was hardly touched when the 
door swung open and we stepped into a hospitable 
hall as large as an ordinary room, its walls hung 
with paintings ; facing the door was the old-fashioned 
broad staircase ; half-way up the stairs, on the first 
landing, stood the tall clock, saying : 

" For ever, never; 
Never, forever." 

On the left of the entrance was the small reception- 
room, and back of it the dining-room ; on the other 



196 HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 

side was the historic study which has been so many 
times described. In the rear of this was the large 
drawing-room or library, into which we were ushered 
after laying aside our wraps. The drawing-room was 
cheery with red hangings ; in the corner stood a large 
grand piano, the walls were literally lined with book- 
shelves, and in the centre of the room stood a table 
bestrewn with books and iDapers. A cheery ojDen 
fireplace, whose yawning mouth was encircled by a 
row of quaintly-colored tiles, and which gave forth 
a genial warmth from a huge log crackling on some 
curious brass andirons, added color and warmth to 
the home picture. But why linger on the mere out- 
side shell ? 

The door suddenly opened and Longfellow walked 
in. He was rather shorter in stature than we had 
anticipated, but very erect and vigorous ; his frame 
was neither stout nor thin ; his face was ruddy in 
complexion and surrounded by a mass of silvery 
white hair ; the eyes, surmounted by bushy eye- 
brows, were the chief charm of the mobile face ; 
they looked out so bright and keen that it was diffi- 
cult to tell their color, though it appeared to be 
blue ; we were inclined to be struck by the brilliancy 
rather than the shade. Around the eyes were some 
characteristic wrinkles, which gave a genial and hap- 
py exj)ression to the face when the poet smiled. As 



HENRY WADS IVOR TH LONGFELLOW. 197 



he entered tliere was a cordial grace and ease in his 
manner which put every one at ease. It is related 
that before Heine met Goethe he had prepared a fine 
speech to deliver, but when he saw the great man he 
could only stammer, ' ' Ah ! the plums are very fine 
on the road to Weimar." But one needed not to 
XDrepare a speech before meeting Longfellow ; he 
himself was your insx)iration. When you met him 
you felt you were with a friend ; immediately " your 
dumb devil took leave of you." 

After shaking hands with us all the poet laugh- 
ingly said: "It is an embarrassment of riches — I'd 
offer my arm to one of you, but I don't know 
which! " So the six ladies went in arm-in-arm, Mr. 
Longfellow followed, and the company of seven sat 
down at the cheerful round table. On the wall at 
the left of the pleasant dining-room hung a large oil- 
painting of the three daughters of the poet ; from 
this picture the photograph which is so popular has 
been taken. All through dinner-time the poet chat- 
ted and talked, flying like a bird lightly from branch 
to branch, and making whatever subject he lingered 
on cheerful and bright. He spoke of Carlyle, who 
was still alive, and praised him in very high terms. 
" I particularly admire his 'French Revolution' and 
'Frederick the Great, "^ he said; "I consider him 
as one of the few writers who have made history 



198 HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 

really live. Carlyle saw facts with his imagina- 
tion." 

7 Then the poet gave some reminiscences of his col- 
lege days at Bowdoin. "The study that I most dis- 
liked was Forensics," he continued. "I begged the 
I)resident to excuse me, but, to my surprise, when the 
class came up I was the first one called uj^on to re- 
cite ! I don' t think the i^resident was very fond of 
me. Some of our professors, too, were very amus- 
ing ; one of them in Mental Science always began 
questioning us in this manner : ' Now, young gentle- 
men, what is logic ; or, in the words of the author, 
logic is what ? 4- 1 clid ^^^ ^^^^ so much for the mere 
bare facts of Mental Science ; I loved them clothed 
in ai)propriate words. Do you remember this fine 
quotation from John Locke : 'Thus the ideas, as well 
as children, of our youth often die before us; and 
our minds represent to us those tombs to which we 
are approaching where, though the brass and marble 
remain, yet the inscrij)tions are effaced by time and 
the imagery moulders away ' ? " Then he solemnly 
added: "God grant that I may be preserved from 
that ! ' ' The prayer has been granted, and he has 
been taken fi'om us while still strong and able to 
bear the poet's message to humanity. 

Soon after reciting this passage the conversation 
turned to poets and poetry. "Dante is a transcen- 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 199 



dent poet," said his translator, and then recited in 
Italian a portion of the opening canto of the " Infer- 
no." "Can anything be more simple and direct than 
that, and yet more musical and fuU of thought?" 
he asked. "It is easy enough to be simple at the 
expense of beauty," he added, "or to be musical at 
the expense of thought ; the great poet is the man 
who, at a white heat, welds simplicity with beauty, 
and thought Avith music." 

After dinner the ladies retired to the drawing- 
room ; about half an hour later Longf eUow entered 
and turned over the bound pages of Vanity Fair, a 
periodical filled witli caricatures of different cele- 
brated men. All the time he was turning the len,ves 
there flowed forth a running commentary of wit, 
memories, and anecdotes which it is as impossible 
to describe as it would be to picture by words a 
mountain brook. Upon the mantel there was a 
beautiful photograph of a refined, delicate face. It 
was a man of about thirty-five apparently, with a 
fine broad forehead, soft, silky hair brushed care- 
lessly back, dark, dreamy eyes, and an exquisitely 
chiselled mouth and chin. " I am glad you like the 
photograph," said the poet to me. "It represents 
my dear friend Euskin at his best. I met Ruskin 
first in Paris. His manner was very quiet, gentle, 
and mild, but tinged with deep melancholy ; it was 



200 HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 

just after his domestic trouble. His first words on 
meeting me were, ' Sir, you Iviiow I hate Americans ! ' 
but he said it with such a gentle smile and manner 
I could not take offence, ' Very well, sir,' I replied. 
From that time we were firm friends. When I saw 
him for the last time he said to me : 'It's very strange ; 
I cannot understand it ! I hate Americans, and yet 
you, Mr. Longfellow, and Mr. Norton, both Ameri- 
cans, are the only two men with whom I feel tho- 
roughly happy, sympathetic, and at ease.' After 
our first meeting in Paris I met Ruskin again at 
Verona, a city which I admire greatly. I stopjied by 
chance at the same hotel with him, ran across his 
valet one morning, and told him to ask his master to 
come down to table-d'hote. ' I never go to table- 
d'liote,' was the response ; but he came in to see me 
later, and we spent a charming evening together. 
Next day we drove around Verona and visited the 
amphitheatre together. A few days later I saw him 
busily sketching away in the Piazza della Erba, while 
his valet was holding a crowd of Italian lazzaroni at 
bay. The last time I saw Rnskin he was perched on 
top of a ladder in front of the grand monument to 
Can Grande, sketching in some architectural details. 
I am afraid that Ruskin's love for detail leads him to 
overlook breadth ; for instance, he took me to a little 
church in Verona, wher.e the one thing he singled out 



HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 201 

as worthy of admiration was a small twisted pillar 
mounted on a griffin' s back ! Ruskin has really a 
wonderful fondness for delicacy of effect and fine- 
ness, however. He has a thoroughly sensitive, fine 
nature, which demands thoroughness in the least. 
His manner, courteous, refined, with the old-school 
politeness which is fast passing away in our rough 
and hurried life, is most charming." 

After leaving Ruskin the conversation flowed light- 
ly on around other topics. " I hate parodies," said 
the poet warmly. "A man who parodies a good 
poem ought to be hanged — metaphorically, of course," 
he added quickly. " I do not mind critics or criti- 
cism so much. A man's best critic should be him- 
self. You generally believe a critic only when he 
agrees with you. But it is much more important to 
make your life fit your own standard than theirs. 
The great struggle of a poet should be toward ori- 
ginality." 

In a short discussion upon American novelists he 

said: "I cannot see how can place so much 

value upon mere bric-a-brac ; those things are the 
trappings of art, the stage properties merely. Did 
it vitally matter to Hawthorne that there were no 
castles in America ? The true life is the life of tlie 
soul, and not of the body ; within our four walls lies 
our home ; all of human life lies in the home. Ame- 



202 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

rica, having this, has all that the richest nation in the 
world could desire.' 

So the conversation flowed on ; but who can repro- 
duce its thousand felicities, its cheeriness, its breadth, 
its kindliness and world-wide sympathy ? What has 
been given is the mere shadow of the past ; let those 
who love the poet take it as it was meant — an attempt 
to throw a single flower, dwarfed though it may be, 
upon the newly-made grave of that loved poet whom 
the whole world delights to honor ! E. A. T. 

Brooklyn, April 7, 1882. 



There were memorial addresses before the Society 
for Ethical Culture in the forenoon of April 2. The 
following is an account of the services, which were 
begun by Professor Felix Adler : 

Peof. Felix Adler : 

Our platform is graced to-day by the presence of 
a poet whose name is familiar and dear to many 
thousands in this land. To such a one it behooves 
us to show honor and respect in all things. I shall 
do so now by respecting the wish which he has 
uttered, that I may be wholly brief in j^resenting 
him to this audience. Mr. Richard H. Stoddard 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 203 

will now address you on the Poet and the Divine 
Poetic Art. 

MR. EICIIAED H. STODDARD' S ADDRESS. 

I have been asked to speak for a few minutes 
about Mr. Longfellow, but not so much about him 
personally as about the choir of poets to which he 
belonged, and the place that the faculty which he 
and they j)ossess, and possessed, holds among the 
endowments of the race. It is not with the Man, 
or the Men, that I propose to detain you, but with 
the genesis of his, and their. Work. He was one 
of many — but not so many, after all — who were 
gifted with powers that are not common to the gen- 
erations of mankind. Why they were so gifted no 
man knows, and of the source of their powers all 
must remain ignorant. It is one of the mysteries 
that surround us, perhaps the heart of the dear- 
est, as the Infinite Unknown of our poor human 
speech is the soul of the profoundest — the creative 
energy which we call Father. The first poet was 
the first man who was conscious of himself and of 
the Universe— the childly-hearted creature of whom 
the twinkle of a dewdrop, the delicate grace of a 
spring blossom, or the fingers of the wind that dal- 
lied with his hair made a lyrical singer; to whom 
the surf sang strophes of jubilance ; the flash of 



204 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

lightning and the crash of thunder were Ode and 
Epode of a mighty measure ; moonlights epithala- 
mia, and darkness the pall of the tragedy of the 
Unknowable. When he opened his eyes to the 
glory and the teiTor that were about him he was 
a poet. If we could recall our childish conceptions 
of these we might recall the voices that awakened 
his sjDirit, the apparitions that beckoned to and 
eluded it. The earliest message that ajoproached 
his ear from the lijDS of Nature was half inaudible 
and of uncertain import. He knew not whether to 
be delighted or afraid. He was aware of another 
and a stronger than himself — of something above 
him, below him, within him, from AVhom he could 
not escape, a perpetual environment and fulfilment 
— the Maker securing the made. So far as they can 
be traced, the primitive utterances of man were a 
recognition of Power, which speedily became pow- 
ers, which assumed names, and were clothed upon 
by shadowy, elemental, fleshly shapes — adumbra- 
tions of their worshippers lorojected against the 
wall of the worlds. Man made liis gods, in his 
own image, but sui^erior, for good and evil ; and as 
he made them, so they remain to-day — the good, let 
us hope, trampling the evil under foot. The old- 
est poems extant are invocations to deities — orphic 
hymns that strove to capture and detain their 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 205 

singers hardly knew wliat, to translate the origi- 
nal language of encircling Presences into the dia- 
lects of barbaric tribes ; confessions of transgres- 
sion and supplications for forgiveness ; mortal ac- 
knowledgments of the divine, like those in the Sa- 
cred Book of the Hebrews : ' ' Lord, what is man 
that thou art mindful of 1dm, or the son of man 
that thou visitest him?" Such were these old for- 
gotten poets, and such their strains in the morn- 
ing of Time. 

While the spiritual needs of man were demand- 
ing those rhythmic recognitions, his physical needs 
were demanding their recognition in stormier music 
— in the rugged songs that narrated his encounters 
with savage beasts, and in the short, sharp odes that 
strengthened his sinews to heave great rocks upon 
his foes, and to brain them with upwrecked forests 
— valorous, vindictive, victorious. The hands of 
Nimrod conquered in the one, the fires of Moloch 
consumed in the other, and the earth v/as darken- 
ed with the smoke of battle. From out this tumult 
stole forth slowly, but surely, a Woman not seen 
before, stern, but sad and gracious, whose office it 
was to recover and embalm the memory of heroes, 
friends and foes, both noble, now they were gone ; 
so just, so human, is the twin sister of song — Tra- 
dition. But back of all these shapes and sounds, 



2o6 HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 



back of the soldier in battle and tlie gray-bearded 
priest ill sacred places, are beauteous shadows and 
melodious voices, figures of youths and maids sit- 
ting upon banks of flowers, or stealing through 
the twilight of secluded woods, whispering secrets, 
exchanging hearts, clasping hands, looking immor- 
tal life, old-world lovers, singing the song that 
never is old. Perhaps they touch rude instru- 
ments, fetch music from string and shell, or up 
and dance for utter joy; whatever they do, all's 
well. 

" Be notafeard ; the isle is full of noises, 
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not." 

Through all these jocund ditties float, from vine- 
yards where grapes are trodden into wine, from pro- 
cessions along tho highways crowned with vine- 
leaves, with faces flushed, trumpets blowing, cym- 
bals clashing, emptied cups and stumbling feet, pass- 
ing away, the sons of Belial, Thammnz and the Sy- 
rian damsels, Bacchus and Silenus, poetic impersona- 
tions of opulence and waste. Be sure that more than 
revelry was meant in tliese, that hidden therein were 
myths whose original meaning hath escaped us — 
parables of the use and abuse of good, parents of 
Saadi and Omar Khayyam. 



HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 207 

" Why, be this juice the growth of God, who dare 
Blaspheme the twisted tendril as a snare ? 

A blessing we should use it, should we not ? 
And if a curse, why, then, who set it there ? " 

The soul solicits wisdom. It is delivered by the 
poet. The limits of our vision and our set habits of 
mind narrow our knowledge and conceptions of po- 
etry. Before Greece was, and her mighty mother, 
Egypt, there was a world of song. There were poets 
in the steppes of Scythia, in the defiles of the Hima- 
layas, along the banks of the Niger, in the mines of 
Cornwall, in the endless forests of the unfonnd con- 
tinent, on the surf- washed beaches of the Pacific, and 
over the sunken cities of the Atlantides — wherever 
mankind was, there were poets. Everywhere the 
fourfold stream of religion, and love, and war, and 
wine was flowing, and men and women rose and 
floated and sunk therein from of old, as they are 
rising and floating and sinking now. It sings about 
a thousand little islands peopled with lyrical birds ; 
it lapses gaily along the sunny shore of comedy ; it 
sets perpetually to the world where tragedy is, sur- 
rounded by lost lovers and unwedded maids, dis- 
crowned and unsceptred kings and queens, wan rulers 
of crushed empires weighed down with Fate. What- 
ever the race has been, is, or may be, that poetry has 
been, is, and must be. It is human life and death. 



/ 



2o8 HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 



From the beginning it has broadened and deepened. 
The simple worship of tlie world's forefathers shaped 
itself into prayers, invocations, and mystic hymns — 
the Vedas, the Zendavesta, the Theogony, the He- 
brew Writings, and the Evangelists. The anger 
of its children shaped itself into war-songs in all 
lands, and into the epical ocean wherein they were 
discharged — Iliads, Mahabharratas, iEneids, Divine 
Comedies, Paradises Lost. The wine-bibbing of its 
grandchildren shaped itself into satiric combats be- 
tAveen rival w^its, wdio set the rustics agape, and 
whose torches reached us through the hands of 
Aristophanes, Terence, Moliere, and Shakespeare; 
the sorrow and sullenness of all reaching us in 
Prometheus, Medea, Antigone, gliding away in a 
thousand pallid figures, to reappear as Hamlet, Lear, 
Queen Katharine, Lady Macbeth. Amorists of an- 
tiquity reached us through the souls of Hero and 
Leander, Dante and Beatrice, 

' ' And many more the Muse may not rehearse. " 

Akin to these crying and laughing ones, were and 
are, the shepherd-folk and countrymen of Theocritus, 
Bion and Moschus, Keats and Tennyson. Such are 
the dwellers in, and such the dominion of, Song, 
whereof the Poet is Sovereign, Lord under the Great 
Lord of the lesser universe. It is an awful sceptre 



HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 209 

wliicli lie holds, this Porphyrogenitiis, for the honor 
which accompanies it must be borne meekly, and the 
burden which it imposes is for life and death. He 
receives what the Giver sends, and gives it again — 
what, he knows not, save that it is good. 

*' There is a soul of goodness in things ill. 
Would men observingly distil it out." 

The divine light streams : 

' ' Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, 
Stains the white radiance of Eternity." 

First-born of Nature, and more closely held to her 
heart than any of her children, the poet apprehends 
and comprehends the Universal Mother. What es- 
capes the trained eye of the painter he instinctively 
discerns ; foreseeing the unseen light, and preventing 
the distant darkness, master "of his, moods and inter- 
preter of her mysteries, she has no secrets from her 
darling ! Wisdom whispers her oracles through him. 
He is the mouthpiece of wit, art, eloquence of words, 
purity of sculpture, glory of color, ineffable tender- 
ness and might of music ; fourfold waters of the Un- 
known are the rivers of his Eden, before whose gates 
flames no fiery sword, for man has never been driven 
forth, but walks there at morn and eventide — familiar 
with the gods. 



2 TO HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

Such is the Poet, and such, within his limitations, 
was Longfellow, whom the world laments— most 
gracious of Puritans, beneficent flower from the 
stern old stem of John Alden. 

Peof. Felix Adlee: 

The poet has spoken of poetry, as we have heard. 
It is for the appreciative critic to mark for us the dis- 
tinctive merits of the bard whose loss we deplore to- 
day. No one is more competent to do this than IMr. 
Edwin P. Whipple, a name eminent in American 
literature. Mr. Whipple is prevented by indisposi- 
tion from being with us to-day, and his address will 
be read by Mr. Charles Roberts, Jr., whose perfect 
delivery will form the beautiful vehicle for admirable 
thought. 

ME. EDWiJsr p. Whipple's addeess. 

It was affirmed by one of the great poets of the 
century, who spoke from his inspired insight into the 
external world, that 

' ' They do not err 
Wlio say, that when a poet dies 
Mute Nature mourns her worshipper, 
And celebrates his obsequies." 

Indeed, it is the Mind in this Nature— dumb, but 
neither deaf nor blind — that the poet interprets, and 



HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 211 

shows to be one with the Mind in human nature, 
happily gifted with an articulate voice. The death 
of a poet, therefore, as contrasted with that of the 
most eminent scientist, strikes us all as an abrux)t 
withdrawal of one of those exceptional beings 
through whose vivid spiritual vision of the life of 
things we are enabled to catch glimp)ses of vital reali- 
ties which are not revealed to the keenest scientilic 
observation or the most patient scientific analysis. 

In the case of the departure of Longfellow this 
sense of loss is deepened by our love and admiration 
of the character of the man. It was said, years ago, 
by a competent foreign critic, that there was some- 
thing, he liardly knew what, in the poems of Long- 
fellow which made them universally attractive ; but 
those who personally knew the man readily under- 
stood what constituted the i^eculiar attractiveness of 
the poet. He was, in the first place, one of the hu- 
manest of men, utterly incapable of envy, malice, or 
intolerance, and gifted not only with the power of 
discerning merit in others, but of heartily rejoicing 
in its contemi:)lation. Wherever he api^eared he ra- 
diated the sj)irit of kindliness and beneficence. It 
was impossible to know him without feeling an affec- 
tion for him. And he Avas very comprehensive in his 
humanity. It included sects and jDarties that hated 
and despised each other, and diversities of individual 



212 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

character which were mutually repulsive. His tole- 
ration extended to the toleration of intolerance, even 
when he himself was its victim. Thus, when he 
was vehemently denounced by some earnest aboli- 
tionists for that passage in "The Building of the 
Shij)" glorifying the Union of the States, he quietly 
said to an indignant friend : "These men are justified 
in attacking me. Knowing their opinions as I do, 
they could not honestly act otherwise." 

This breadth of sympathetic feeling gave variety to 
the products of his genius. It enabled him to repro- 
duce many different moods of mind and many difl'er- 
erent forms of character. A glance over his poems 
shows how wide is the field his writings cover. He 
rarely, if ever, repeats himself. If we take his long- 
poems, such as "The Spanish Student," "The Gold- 
en Legend," "Hiawatha," "Evangeline," we wonder 
how the same poet could have selected subjects so 
different, and have treated each with such masterly 
adaptation of his genius to his theme. Our won- 
der is increased when we remember the throng of 
lyrics and minor poems with which he has enriched 
our literature, and the flexibility of mind he displays 
in placing himself on an equality with every idea, 
sentiment, situation, and topic he represents. In all 
these the individuality of the man is constantly per- 
ceived, but the range of the genius is remarkable. 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 213 

Perhaps the controlling element in his nature was 
the moral sentiment, and it is also the dominant qual- 
ity observed in his writings. And his morality is 
the morality of most good men and women. He 
deals in no moral paradoxes, while he touches no 
moral truism without vitalizing it — without impart- 
ing to it a new life, freshness, elevation, beauty, and 
power. He thus finds his way into all self-respecting 
homes and is domesticated at all pure firesides. His 
extraordinary intensity of perception of ordinary 
feelings and beliefs is the chief source of his popu- 
larity. 

The intellectual equipment of this fine nature was 
of exceptional excellence. He was a man of large 
and liberal scholarship, gifted with a creative and 
realizing mind. His learning, therefore, was all 
alive, connecting itself throughout its wide scope of 
accomplishment with suggested thoughts, emotions, 
pictures, and persons. And then consider his power 
of what may be called executive expression. His 
words and images always tell. He ever succeeds in 
conveying to another mind the matter that fills his 
own. It is impossible to miss his meaning, or fail to 
feel it as he feels it. Generally his style impresses 
us by the solidity and weight of its melodiously ar- 
ranged words. In "The Arsenal at Springfield,'' 
"Seaweed," "Sand of the Desert," "The Occulta- 



214 HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 

tionof Orion," " Sandalplion," "The Liglithouse," 
not to mention others, note the massiveness of the 
diction ! What a description is this of the effects of 
war : 

" Tlie tumult of each sacked and burning village, 
The shout that every prayer for mercy drowns, 
The soldiers' revel in the midst of pillage, 
Tlie ivail of famine in heleaguet^ed toivns."' 

How sound helps sense and imagination in this 
verse from "The Lighthouse": 

' ' The startled waves leap over it, the storm 
Smites it with all the scourges of the rain ; 
And steadily against its solid form 
Press the great shoulders of the hurricane." 

Most of Longfellow's poems are characterized by 
this clearness, picturesqueness, and esj^ecially this 
weight of diction. The effect on the ear is as great as 
the effect on the eye. We instinctively read his most 
celebrated pieces aloud. When, as in " Endymion " 
and "Maidenhood," he succeeds in embodying sub- 
tile thoughts and melodies, we commonly find that 
he has failed in reaching his audience of fifty thou- 
sand readers. The most wonderful poem of this kind 
in modern English literature is Tennyson' s ' ' Echo 
Song" in "The Princess" — a lyric whose interior 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 215 



music has never been adequately rendered by the 
voice of any singer or elocutionist. Longfellow's 
efforts in this direction, thougli perhaps artistically 
his best, have never obtained popularity. 

It would be difficult to state in a short address how 
many avenues Longfellovv has opened to the popular 
lieart and brain. The effect of all his writings is to 
purify as well as to i^lease. Few whose sense of 
beauty was so keen have combined with it an ethical 
purpose so high. He belongs to that class of poets, 
we gratefully remember, who have quickened and 
strengthened conscience through kindling appeals to 
the emotions and imagination : 

" Filling' the soul with sentiments august, 
, The beautiful, the brave, the holy, and the just.'' 

PEOF. FELIX ADLEE'S ADDEESS. 

You may inquire in wonder why another v/ord 
should be added to what has already been said. It 
was our wish to-day that the poet should speak to us 
of his noble art, and the distinguished critic i)oint 
out the merits of our Bard. And amply has this wish 
been fulfilled in the words which you have heard. 
And yet I speak as one of many thousands who have 
derived a sweet and restful pleasure from the songs 
of the dead poet. And it is the desire to say my 



2l6 HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 

thanks, the simijle impulse of gratitude, that prompts 
me to add my humbler tribute to what has already 
been said so much better. 

The office of the poet is, indeed, a holy one. Some- 
times he is both poet and prophet in one. Such a 
one Longfellow was not. But always he is both i)oet 
and priest in one : priest at the sacred shrine of the 
feelings. But you may think of certain ones who are 
known as poets, and may ask : Are these, too, to be 
classed as priests ? Yes ; for as there are false priests 
in religion, so there are false jDriests in i^oetry. There 
have been priests who converted their temples into 
temples of lust, and the ceremonies of religion into 
orgies of wild desire, and lifted up the senses upon 
the i)edestals of the gods, and chained the soul upon 
the ground. So there are false priests in jDoetry at 
the present day — men who are filled ^vitli the wind of 
X^assion and drive lawlessly whithersoever the gusts 
of desire urge them on ; men who select what is base 
and foul in human nature to throw over it the gla- 
mour of their art, and who dip the golden goblets of 
l)oetry into the green morass to fill tliem with its rank 
and fetid waters. Such a one Longfellow was not. 
He was a white-robed priest — a priest clad in purity. 
Whatever his clean eyes saw became clean under his 
gaze ; whatever his fine hands seized became fine un- 
der his touch. 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 217 

Secondly, it behooves us to mention the sympathy 
with Avhich he responded to the life of nature and of 
man. He would not have been a poet, indeed, had he 
been devoid of such sympathy. And yet the quali- 
ty of his symi^athy, the tender xDathos that thrills all 
through it, is peculiar to him. To all his singing 
may be applied what he himself said of his " Hiawa- 
tha": that every letter "is full of lioiie and yet of 
heart-break"; or what he causes Prince Henry to say 
in the " Golden Legend": " This life of ours is a wild 
^Bolian harp of many a joyous strain, but underneath 
them all there runs a loud, perpetual wail, as of souls 
in pain." So underneath his verses there seems to 
run the wail as of a soul in jDain. And yet sorrow 
with him was subdued, and grief did not i)revent him 
from receiving into his heart every mood of nature, 
and giving forth again in song the echo of all her 
loveliness and her mystery. Whether he speaks of 
the stars, which he calls "thoughts of God in the 
heavens," or, in a childlike way, " the forget-me-nots 
of the angels ' ' ; whether he tells us of the thunders 
of the avalanche — those voices in which the mountains 
open their snowy lips to speak to each other in the 
primeval language ; whether it is the magic moonlight 
on Louisiana's lakes, or the wild, wailing winter of 
the north, where the snow falls ever deeper, deeper, 
deeper — his soul is still the faithful mirror of nature, 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 



and it is tlie very spirit of tlie scenes he describes 
tliat breatlies tlirougli liim and touclies us in his 
song. 

And as his gentle sympathies go out toward na- 
ture, so do they lovingly twine around his human 
fellow-beings. He has the tenderest heart for chil- 
dren. Listen to these verses which he addresses to 
the little ones : 

** Ye open the eastern windows, 
That look towards the sun, 
Where tlioughts are singing swallows 
And the brooks of morning run. 

' ' Ye are better than all the ballads 
That ever were sung or said ; 
For ye are living poems, 
And all the rest are dead." 

He feels finely for little birds, as is shown by his 
beautiful poem on Walter von der Vogelweide, where- 
in he tells how the famous Minnesinger learned his 
art from the feathered songsters in the air, and out of 
gratitude made provision in his will that birds should 
always be fed on his tomb. He has a true sense of 
the miseries endured by the oppressed, as is shown 
by his beautiful poem on the Jewish Cemetery at 
Newport. But, above all, he expresses the noblest 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 219 

American feeling for woman. And lie has given us 
three ideal types of women, of which it is not too 
mnch to say that they are likely to become a heri- 
tage for our remote descendants: Evangeline, the 
type of woman's fidelity ; Elsie, the type of woman's 
self-sacrifice ; and the beautiful Minnehaha, the type 
of wifely fondness. 

I have said that Longfellow is not a poet of the 
prophetic order. His poetry expresses certain gene- 
ral tender and noble feelings of the human heart. 
But thQ deepest regions of the heart he does not en- 
ter. The way into those regions lies through strug- 
gle and conflict. And struggle and conflict, inward 
as well as outward, the gentle poet shuns. There- 
fore .the sublimest themes, the profoundest asj)ira- 
tions, of our time find no expression in his song. 
He soothes us, but he does not stir. Even when he 
sees great wrongs before him he never strikes the 
lyre in wi*athful chords. The waves of his song do 
not rise high up against the beetling rocks of ^vrong ; 
they do but sob and moan upon the sands below. 
That such was the case we perceive in his poems on 
slavery. It was not in his nature to do battle. He 
appeals to Channing that he should " write and tell 
out this bloody tale." For his own part he sings 
of the slave' s dream of liberty, or of the noble lady 
who liberated her slaves, or of the witnesses at the 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 



bottom of the sea. He sympathizes keenly with the 
sufferings of tlie oppressed, but he does not lend a 
voice to the protest against the wrong of oppression, 
or against fhe cruel oppressors. It is only in the 
last of the series on slavery, in the "Warning," that 
he rises for a moment to the height of prophecy in 
speaking of the x^oor blind Samson of our land, the 
negro, who may some day raise his hand against the 
pillar of our commonwealth and make the vast tem- 
ple of our liberty a shapeless mass of wreck and 
rubbish. 

But it is chiefly in one respect that we should re- 
gard Longfellow as a national poet. It is the mis- 
sion of the poet to express the spirit of his age and 
of his people. He must not utter only what he him- 
self feels ; then he will be no true poet. He must 
say what all feel; then all will love him. Because 
the poet exx)resses for us what moves all our hearts, 
but what none of ns can express so well as he, there- 
fore our feelings find their satisfaction in pouring 
through the cliannels which his verse has made. 
And it is because Longfellow reflects in his poetry 
the spirit of this people that he has come to be so 
near and dear to the heart of the i)eople. The spirit 
of the American people is cosmopolitan. So is tlie 
spirit of Longfellow's poetry cosmopolitan. We call 
these United States the comminglhig place of all na- 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 221 

tionalities, and we are proud to draw the elements 
that make up our citizenshii) from every quarter of 
the globe. So does Longfellow draw the elements 
of his poetry from every clime and every time, bor- 
rowing not only his themes, but also seeking to re- 
produce the feelings of distant lands and ages ; and 
he invites the poets of all places and periods, as it 
were, to an ideal citizenship on the American Par- 
nassus. From the beginning of his career we see 
him doing this, and he does not cease doing so 
until the end. He goes to Spain to reproduce the 
sombre martial spirit of the Spanish past, in the 
funeral hymn of Manrique. He goes to Germany 
for the insj)iration of what is, perhaj^s, the finest 
of his longer poems, the "Golden Legend" — a jDoem 
ringing with the echoes of cloister bells, haunted by 
visions of castles on the Rhine, and dim with the 
dimness of cathedrals. He goes to F]-ance to revive 
the songs of the Troubadours ; to Sweden and Nor- 
way, to the land of the Vikings, and to far-off Asia. 
And when he returns to his own America it is even 
then not so much the life of the present or the an- 
ticipation of the future that kindles his imagination, 
but the old traditions, the oldest that such a young 
American can offer— the legends of the Ojibways, 
the traditions of the Puritans, and the touching tale 
of love in an Acadian village, with thatched roofs 



222 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

and dormer windows — wliicli lie rehearses in his 
flowing verses. 

It is the Past that shines in the eyes of Longfel- 
low. In him the spirit of America, ere it set out to 
create the glories of the future, has turned back 
once more to revisit, as in a dream, the mystic splen- 
dors of -the past. There will come hereafter a grander 
America, a new national life, new attitudes of mind, 
new^ and original modes of feeling, new themes for 
action, new inspirations for song. And a mightier 
race of bards will then strike the lyre of America. 
But, however great the future may be, the peoi)le 
will never forget him who was the poet of their 
younger life, and of whom, we may well say, using 
his own words concerning another, he was "a noble 
poet, one whose heart was like a nest of singing 
birds, rocked on the topmost bough of life." On 
the topmost bough of life, high up under the clear 
ether, in the golden light, hung the heart of Long- 
fellow — that nest of song ! To-day the nest is emptj^-, 
the singing birds have flown away, but they have 
flown into the hearts of thousands, and are still 
singing there, and will go on singing for years and 
years to come, their sweet and purifying music. 



LETTERS 



New York, April 8, 1883. 

What impression would the work of Northern 
poets, as interpretative of Nature, make on a i-eader 
who had never seen the countries, or even the geo- 
graphical zones, which they describe? 

The question is a curious one. I may contribute 
something to it from my own experience. 

I was born and brought up, until eighteen years 
old, in a tropical country that is exceptionally fortu- 
nate in its climate ; A\'inter or rough weather, in the 
sense of cold, there is none, ' ' nor ever storm blows 
rudely," and though the snow lay visibly, nine days 
out of ten, upon the distant mountain- tops, it was 
through all my earlier years a mystery to me in its 
remoteness ; and doubly tantalizing that I was eager- 
ly reading, day by day, in my father's house by the 
seaside, of Northern winters and winter sports, of 
skating, snow-balling, sleighing, and striving to re- 
construct in imagination the conditions of life in 
the fatherland. During these years the touch of 

223 



2 24 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

snow was unknown to me, wliile all the time the 
snow itself lay in sight upon the mountain summits. 
It was naturally to the poets' descriptions of 
winter and of autumn that I turned with esj)ecial 
interest. Bryant taught me what the American au- 
tumn was before I had seen its hectic in New Eng- 
land fields. Longfellow gave me most vivid im- 
pressions of winter. What pleasure it was to read 
and read again the " Midnight Mass for the Dying 
Year," "Woods in Winter," "Afternoon in Febru- 
ary," and many a pictorial line or passage in the 
longer poems ! In these I took an interest beyond 
their strictly poetical or imaginative charm — the in- 
terest, namely, of a mind seeking to find in those 
passages something literally interpretative of the 
alien outward nature which they described, some 
touch that should put before the inward eye the 
strange life which the bodily eye had not seen. I 
may say that the realization was fairly successful, 
though my efforts had to be supplemented by other 
writers than Longfellow, whose favorite season of the 
four was rather spring than winter, and who in none 
of his descriptions practised the extreme minuteness 
of realistic x>ortraiture that was already becoming a 
common thing. Wordsworth has shown how unsafe 
the descriptions even of the professed apostles of 
Nature maybe. In his poem on the "Influence of 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 225 

Natural Objects," as it first appeared in "The 
Friend," lie describes his sj)orts on the ice; and he 
tells us that not seldom he left the tumultuous 
throng of his fellow-skaters 

' ' To cut across the image of a Star 
That gleamed upon the ice." 

This is a flagrant example of scholastic athletics that 
have no counter^Dart in the possibilities of outward 
life. Longfellow dared less than Wordsworth in 
the minutely descriptive way, and consequently lies 
under the blame of fewer errors of commission. But 
tlie positive data wliich the troj)ical reader found in 
his i3oetry for the reconstruction of the North, with 
its ice and fogs and temj)ests, though they were 
valuable, were not abundant. One thing which the 
Northern poets might have described for the South- 
ern reader, but inexcusably did not describe, was 
frozen snow — snow that has been softened and recon- 
gealed ; and I shall never forget the disappointment 
caused me by this culpable neglect on the part of the 
various poets of Nature whom I had read. For when 
at last, grown to an active boy, I climbed tlie sum- 
mit of Mauna Kea to touch the wondrous snow 
that I had gazed on so long, I found it no fleecy 
substance, no pile- of plastic flakes, but on the 
contrary a rigid mass of crj^stals that refused to 



2 26 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

yield to my toncli, and clung as stubbornly to tlie 
ground as if they were a part of the lava-bed on 
Avliich they rested. It was a surprise for which I 
blamed the poets. 

Still the poets were full of help for the recon- 
struction of the Northern seasons. When first I 
saw falling 'snow (I remember it was in the college 
grounds at New Haven) it seemed a thing familiar 
enough, and I was glad of tliis, fearing to be scoffed 
at for my ignorance. But as none of my companions 
seemed to suspect it, I confessed to one of them that 
this was my first snow-storm ; and learned that it 
was well not to be too frank, as he instantly i)ro- 
posed a sound snow-balling as the correct treatment 
of the stranger from the tropics. Longfellow's poems 
had not prepared me for this reception. 

Titus Munson Coan. 



6 East Fourteenth Street, New York, 
April 10, 1882. 

The death of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow re- 
minds me once more of some of the pleasantes 
hours of my youth, and of the evidence of the wide 
diffusion of his writings as far back as 1853. I was 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 227 

tlien fresh from my first enthusiasm in poetry, hav- 
ing read " Rokeby " with the pleasure that one takes 
when he enters a new and beautiful land, and eagerly 
looks forward to the pleasure he anticipates from 
continued i^ursuit of its unexj)lored attractions. Liv- 
ing then on the enchanting shores of the Bosphorus, 
at the village of Bebek, in the suburbs of Constanti- 
nople, where every prospect suggested some historic 
legend, and every glimpse of the scenery fired the im- 
agination ; where the climate is of the softest, tlie 
landscaiDe hued in the most vivid tints, the x)eoi)le 
picturesque to the last degree, the nightingale' s song 
pervading the still, moonlit watches of the night, and 
life steej^ed in an atraosi^here of romance, there could 
have .been no poetry better qualified to please the 
ardor of a youth spent in that spot than the cantos 
of "Rokeby," the strophes of " Childe Harold," and 
the x)atlietic cadences of "Evangeline," or the state- 
ly measures of "Nuremberg" and the "Belfry of 
Bruges." • 

Already were the poems of Longfellow familiar to 
the English and American residents at the Turkish 
cajDital, and even to some of the better educated of 
the Greek population, through the choice little vol- 
umes bearing the imi)rimatur of Ticknor & Fields, 
and bound in brown cloth stamped with a design 
which is well known to all who are familiar with 



2 28 HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 

American poetry. At tlie deliglitful little waterside 
hamlet of Bebek we Englisli-speaking boys had 
formed a small literary club, wliere we recited the 
poems of Longfellow, while in our idle hours he was 
one of our favorites. I well remember often sitting 
in XI certain window overlooking the Bosphorus, 
watching or sketching the fleets slowly dropping 
down the azure current from the Black Sea ; nearer 
by gleamed the gilded spire of the minaret above 
the grove of chenars beneath whose shade the Turk 
enjoyed his nargile, and beyond arose the pointed 
roof of the sultan's pavilion in the Valley of Hea- 
venly Waters. There we read and reread the admi- 
rable translation of Jasmin' s ' ' Blind Girl of Castel 
Cuille," and discussed or learned by heart the thrill- 
ing lines of "Excelsior," or passages from the ro- 
mance of the heroine of Acadie. The melodious 
descriptions of American scenery filled us with long- 
ings to see the great continent beyond the sea, or 
the "Wreck of the Schooner Hesperus" thrilled 
the imagination like a touch of winter and storm 
suddenly infused into the amenity of the scene njDon 
which we were gazing. An English youth, one of 
the brightest of our number, was for ever reciting 
verses from Byron's "Isles of Greece" or Longfel- 
low's "Excelsior." About that time also a cloud 
which for a while threw its shadow over the noonday 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 229 

of our liapj)iness gave peculiar siguilicance to the 
"Voices of the Mght" and " Resignation" — a poem 
which has i)robably contributed more to console the 
sorrowing than any other poem of its length in the 
language. 

Was it a small thing that the dead poet should 
have diffused so widely the influence of his genius, 
helping to shape character in other lands, to ennoble 
the heart, to inspire just sentiments of life, and en- 
courage the inexperienced or the afflicted with songs 
of hope and cheer ? With the ever-increasing ad- 
vance of foreign influences and education in the East 
it may be safely predicted that the poems of Long- 
fellow are destined to be more widely read and ap- 
preciated there for many years to come. 

S. Gr. W. BEIfJAMI]^^. 



The Studio, New York, April 15, 1883. 

My dear Mr. Stoddard : Ever since my visit 
to Cambridge to make di'awings for your article in 
Scribner I have felt glad to have had such an oppor- 
tunity to know the peculiarly gentle and considerate 
qualities of mind and heart that characterized Mr. 
Longfellow. 

On presenting your letter of introduction, making 



230 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

known the object of my visit to Cambridge, lie re- 
ceived me most cordially, and gave me every opportu- 
nity to do my work. 

His life aj^peared to be a very busy one, conse- 
quently I took particular jDains not to disturb liim. 
He quickly perceived this feeling, and would look me 
up two or three times a day, somewhere about the 
grounds or in some part of the house, wherever I 
happened to be. He said one day : "A i)late was 
placed for you at the table yesterday, but when the 
dinner-hour came I looked for you where I had seen 
you a moment before, and you were not to be found. 
You reminded me of a Prince Rupert's drop." 

One lovely, sunny morning, while I was sketch- 
ing in the rear of the house, sounds of a voice sing- 
ing, accompanied by a piano, came to me through an 
open window. Presently Mr. Longfellow came out 
and asked me to go in and hear the singing, saying a 
lady friend had called and that she sang so finely he 
could not let her go without hearing her sing, and 
that he believed I, too, would enjoy it. 

The singing was admirable, and song after song 
was called for. Mr. Longfellow's face expressed the 
great j)leasure he felt. After the music he talked of 
places and associations vividly recalled by the music. 

On another occasion the conversation drifted upon 
the immortality of the soul and the future life. He 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 23 1 

spoke with great feeling, and expressed a firm belief 
that we should preserve our identity and that we 
should meet our old and loved friends, 

Ke left upon my mind a strong impression that 
his life had been spent in a world quite different from 
the common, and that the beauty of his character had 
in great part created it. 

Very truly your friend, 

R. Swain Giefoed. 



Concord, Mass., April 24, 1883. 

My dear Stoddard : It is nearly twenty years 
sinc^ I saw Mr. Longfellow, At that time I was a 
boy in school or college, and he had for me the in- 
terest of a handsome historical subject chiefly — an 
object whose name was Longfellow, and who had 
written most of the poetry with which at that period 
I was familiar. But, as you know, he and my father 
were college friends, and as long as our household 
held together he was a household word with us. He 
was among the first to speak up about "Twice-Told 
Tales." And, on the other hand, my mother used to 
tell us that my father made him a present of " Evan- 
geline"; for, the two being in talk together, Haw^- 
thorne alluded to the theme as one that he might 



232 HENRY IVADSlVORril LONGFELLOW. 

possibly use in a story, and Longfellow tliereniDon 
evinced such a liearty apx3reciation of the x^oetical 
potentialities of it that Hawthorne finally said, with a 
smile, ^'Well, it belongs to you," or words to that 
effect. I remember reading to my father a few months 
before he died the passage in " Evangeline " which de- 
scribes her discovery of her lover in the hospital, and 
his death. He listened with a certain i)rofound and 
still attention that sometimes characterized him, and 
at the end seemed inwardly and quietly moved. My 
mother, Avho j^robably had some presentiment even 
then that her own grief might not be far distant, said 
to me afterwards, half reproachfully : ' ' Why did 
you read papa that?" But perhaps it was as fit a 
word as any other for the time. 

How much or often my father used to read Long- 
fellow I know not ; but he used to encourage or urge 
me to learn many of his poems by heart, stimulating 
my appetite thereto by first reading them aloud to 
me himself and giving ear afterwards to my declama- 
tions of them, which were apt to take i:)lace during 
our walks through fields and woods. " The Skeleton 
in Armor" was one of my first and best-loved acqui- 
sitions in this kind, and the first "piece" I spoke at 
school was the passage in "The Building of the Ship " 
beginning "Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!" 
which my father selected for me, and which (this was 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 233 

in 1861) doubtless had for him a sufficiently grave 
and earnest significance, the Ship being then under 
much stress of weather. "Hiawatha had appeared 
13reviously, while we were still in England, and my 
father chuckled over some parts of it ; but on the 
whole I think he admired it as much as anything 
that Longfellow wrote, and returned to it oftener. 

When my father died Longfellow came to the 
funeral, and I saw him standing at the open grave 
with his hat off, the sunshine falling on his gray hair. 
A week or two afterwards he wrote to my mother en- 
closing the first draft of the eloquent little poem that 
ends, you remember, 

" Ah! who shall lift that wand of magic power, 
Oi' the lost clew regain? 
The unfinished window in Aladdin's tower 
Unfinished must remain " 

— true poetry, and truth, too, if there ever was any. 
The letter itself was very beautiful and kind, and if I 
knew where it was I would send it to you. Possibly 
it may have been XDublished already, for all New Eng- 
land seems to have taken to writing Longfellow's bio- 
graphy. 

Another little poem of his, about the battle in 
Hampton Roads between the Merrimac and the 
Oumherland, was read to my father and me by James 



234 HENKY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 



T. Fields before its publication in the Atlantic. Mr. 
Fields read witli good emphasis and discretion, and 
my father expressed a strong liking for the poem, 
which likewise had the distinction of being declaimed 
by me the following Wednesday at school, mnch to 
Mr. Sanborn's edification, he not having, of course, 
heard it before. 

This pretty nearly exhausts my available reminis- 
cences of Longfellow. They resemble those of every 
one else who was brought into any kind of relations 
■with him, in being wholly pleasant. It was easy to 
comprehend that gracious and gentle character, and 
impossible not to love him, at least as far as one's 
comj^rehension went. He died a few days after my 
return from a ten years' visit to Europe, so that I had 
no opportunity to supxolement my boyish by any ma- 
turer knowledge of him. Many famous men are leav- 
ing us nowadays, but none, perhaps, has been so 
generally mourned ; and it is certainly much to the 
general credit that this should be so. 
Yours very sincerely, 

Julian HAWTHOETiTE. 



BosTOJf Public Library, May 5, 1882. 

My dear Stoddard : I have delayed answering 
your letter because I did not know what to say ; nor 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 235 

do I now, only tliis : A thousand words, or ten thou- 
sand, might be written about "some uncollected 
j)oems of Longfellow." There are, as you well know, 
a dozen or more which were printed in his college 
days, of which only four or five were XDublished in 
his collected writings as "earlier poems." 

A reference to these, with a few lines and stanzas 
culled from them here and there as specimens, might 
be X3refaced by an account of the circumstances under 
which they were published in the United States Lit- 
erary Gazette. This Gazette has a history not with- 
out interest ; for among the contributors to its first 
volumes, contemporaneously with the Longfellow boy, 
were Bryant, Percival, Grenville Mellen, etc., etc., 
all of which you know, and more too. 

In a letter in my collection, written to the editor, 
Longfellow aspired to be associate editor of the 
journal ; and from this some extracts might be made. 
You see the nature of the materials which might be 
worked up into a readable chapter by "a literary 
feller " who has a light hand and deft touch for such 
matters, the which I neither am nor have. 
Very truly yours, 

Mellen Chambeelaust. 



236 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

The Century, New York, May 8, 1881. 

My deae Stoddaed : You ask me to tell you 
what I may know of Mr. Longfellow, I wish I 
could say I knew him ; yet the little I saw of him — 
only twice — made me seem at least to know the 
genial, kindly, true j)oetic nature of the man. I met 
him first at the University Press, in Cambridge, and 
was introduced to him by my friend, that most 
capable of printers, Mr. Welch. Mr. Longfellow 
seemed to know something of me, greeted me very 
cordially, and asked me to walk up with him to his 
house. I had the pleasure of doing so and of talk- 
ing an hour with him, he inquiring of many English 
matters, among others, I recollect, of the poems of 
my old friend, W. B. Scott. Need I say it was a 
pleasant hour, memorable, though I do not pretend 
to repeat anything he said ? This must have been ten 
years ago. Some two years ago I ventured to call 
again to introduce the editor of the American Art 
.Review, Mr. Koehler, we wanting some authorization 
or aid from Mr. Longfellow in order to obtain per- 
mission to copy a certain portrait. Mr. Longfellow 
himself opened the door to us, and on my asking if 
he recollected me, answered graciously that he did, 
and took us into his sitting-room. Our visit being 
really on business, we did not feel justified in pro- 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 237 

longing it, though certainly we were not hurried off ; 
and again I recall the pleasantness of a most infor- 
mal and kindly recex^tion. This is nothing to tell 
you, but it is much for me to recollect. I saw and 

spoke with him — that was enough. 

W. J. LiNTOJsr. 



AsTOR Library, New York, May 8, 1882. 

Among the cherished memories of distinguished 
men of letters, in both hemispheres, it has been my 
privilege to have met, not the least interesting is that 
of Professor Longfellow. Some few summers since, 
when visiting the "modern Athens of America," 
and in company with a clerical friend from Newton, 
we drove to the classic town of Cambridge, so re- 
nowned for its halls of learning and its picturesque 
beauties, both of nature and art. We called at the 
Craigie House to pay our respects to Mr. Longfellow, 
and we were not only so fortunate as to find him at 
leisure, but he received us with such courteous ur- 
banity and unostentatious kindness as at once made 
us feel at ease in his presence, and led to a very 
interesting conversation concerning literature and 
literary men, his travels in Europe, etc. 

Not having noted down any memoranda of these 
items, many, or most of them, have now escaped my 
memory ; and yet, now that he has passed away, 



238 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

even fragments of his wise words possess for ns a 
value unknown before. His generous, and even en- 
thusiastic, praise of the works of several of his bro- 
ther bards was conspicuous, as illustrative of his 
native modesty — the modesty of true genius. In this 
respect he not only resembled Washington Irving, 
but also no less in his kindliness of nature and gen- 
tle courtesy of deportment. As we entered the his- 
toric home of the poet the first object that met our 
gaze was the quaint "old clock on the stairs," and, 
passing into the drawing-room, we were cordially 
received by the host, although my acquaintance with 
him had hitherto been merely by corresi)ondence. 
This reception-room was decked and garnished witli 
great artistic taste, the walls being covered with 
choice paintings and portraits, while the bookcases 
were surmounted with statuary, and the tables load- 
ed with valuable relics and objects of mrtu and M- 
j outer ie. In fine, this presence-chamber looked like 
a combiimtion of a poet's pleasaunce and an artist's 
studio. In course of our gossip, having referred to 
the great popularity of Mr. Ruskin in England, and 
also in the United States, as an authority in the de- 
partment of Art Criticism, Mr. Longfellow replied : 
" He resembles a squadron of cavalry sweeping 
all before them and taking the field. Ruskin is 
a master of style," he continued, "and, although 



HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 339 

not wholly unimpeachable, he is usually correct." 
When the names were mentioned of James Russell 
Lowell, the author of the "Autocrat of the Break- 
fast-Table," and Whittier, he did not fail to recog- 
nize and applaud their distinctive and characteristic 
merits. And yet more earnestly did he accord to 
Ralph Waldo Emerson his high meed of fame. It 
was our good fortune to visit the philosopher on the 
following day, and to listen to his sententious wis- 
dom for a brief, delightful hour. Mr. Longfellow 
took us through his several apartments and into 
sundry nooks and corners, in which many a precious 
tome was carefully treasured and "kept from eyes 
profane." When travelling in Italy, he said, he 
found an incomplete set of Bodoni's celebrated edi- 
tion of Dante ; it lacked but one volume, yet, im- 
perfect as it was, it was too great a prize to be lost 
or left behind, so he brought the volumes home with 
him, never expecting to find the missing one. To his 
joyful surprise, however, he found it, some months 
after his return home, at a bookstall in an obscure 
street of Boston. His eye lighted up with evident 
pleasure and pride as he exhibited to us the now 
complete set of this dainty edition of Dante. Jast 
as we were about to take our leave he referred to 
the splendidly illustrated edition, in two volumes 
quarto, of his Complete Works, and expressed his 



240 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

unqualified pleasure and satisfaction at the rare 
beauty of the designs and the typography. He also 
mentioned the fact that such was the scarcity of the 
first edition of his poems that a copy had been 
offered for sale at five hundred dollars. The home 
of Professor Longfellow — which has been often de- 
scribed by the pen and portrayed by the pencil — like 
the quaint, picturesque Cottage at Sunnyside, and 
that of the Sage of Concord, is so well known to the 
lovers of elegant literature and poesy that hereafter 
many pilgrim feet will wend their way thither, as to 
the "Meccas of the mind," to pay their tribute of 
grateful regard. And for myself, never shall the 
delightful episode of a summer vacation be lost to 
memory that brought me face to face, for a brief 
interval, with one of the most gifted and genial of 
men I have ever met ; and, if I may cite tlie words 
of an eminent English author and tourist who 
shared the like pleasure, I would add, "]N'or shall I 
ever forget that I have been permitted to touch the 
hand and to listen to the discourse, full of calm, and 
wise, and gentle things, of a noble American gentle- 
man—of him who wrote the 'Psalm of Life,' 'The 
Village Blacksmith,' and 'Evangeline' ; of him 
whose life has been blameless, Avhose record is 
pure, whose name is a sound of fame to all peo- 
ple." Fredeeick Saundees. 



HEE'EY WADSWOETH LOI^GFELLOW. 

{AiY IMPROVISATION.) 

The clamorous, sorrowful bells 
Are swingiug out their knells. 

THE BELLS. 

Def unctos ploro ! 
Pestem f ugo ! 
Festa decoro ! 

Floating under heaven's wide arch. 

Along on the boisterous winds of March, 

Over the multitudinous sti-eet, 

Where, hushed with awe, the mourners meet, 

Are flinging about their knells, 

As when the great oi'gan sinks and swells. 

THE BELLS. 

E'unera plango ! 
Fulgura frango ! 
Sabbata pango ! 

Winging their ghostly way above, 
Like the snow-white Pentecostal Dove ; 
Singing the being just begun : 
This is my well-beloved son, 

241 



242 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

On his journey to Paradise, 
Witli its light in his eyes; 
Saying : ' ' Beneclictus qui venis ; 
Manihus o date lilia plenis " ; 
Passijig the houses, hung witli black, 
As though the world was a- wrack ; 
Passing the hearses, with nodding plumes, 
Sable as night ; passing the tombs, 

Daily and nightly 

Gleaming whitely, 
As when March snoweth, 
He cometh and goeth. 

THE BELLS. 

Laudo Deum verum ! 
Congrego clerum ! 

Who are those that come on the Atlantic waves to the west- 
ward, 

Crossing in low, little vessels, a fair-haired Germanic people, 

Masters of horses and steers, the wit of the wise and wary, 

Masters, and stalwart of arm, that know not to be down- 
trodden? 

These are the sons of the meadows of Yoi'kshire, sons of the 
Aldens. 

Summers two hundred and thirty departed in old-fashioned 
England 

Since the first of these comers, stout William, was christened 
Longfellow. 

William crossed ov er in youth with others, and landed elated. 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 243 

Soon was he happily wed to a maiden, his neighbor, Anne 
Sewall. 

William and Anne ere long were the parents — for they were 
prolific — 

Who knows of how many children, with grandchildren — last of 
all Stephen, 

Sire of the sweet singer, Henry, who late, to our sorrow, de- 
parted. 

Such was the birth and such were the parents of Longfellow, 
Poet. 

Duly in the morning. 

With his satchel m his hands, 

Childe Henry hastened schoolward 

And into faery lands : 

A studious youth who conned his books, 

Which were to him like wayside brooks 

That sparkled 

And darkled 

As is the look of country streams 

To wee, wee boys in summer dreams — 

Such as our young master. 

All alive, 

Like a bee in his hive. 

Singing faster and faster. 

When twice the teens came round him 
The rooms of Bowdoiu bound him : 
There with many a college-mate. 
Some of them jocund, some sedate. 
One of them famous, another great. 



244 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

Mighty was Captain Nathaniel, 

Whose father was lost at sea ; 

With the insight of Hebrew Daniel, 

Seer of men was he, 

And will be ever, the world now knows j 

Sharp as the hawthorn, sweet as the rose. 

They studied shelves of leai'ned tomes. 

Both in and out of season — 

Georgeous Cheever who chose the Church, 

And the Abbott of Unreason. 

What is the ditty that Hawthorne sings, 

Like a little robin that prunes its wings ? 

" We are beneath the dark blue sky, 

And the moon is shining bright ; 
Oh ! ivhat can lift the soul so high 

As the gloio of a summer night, 
When all the gay are hushed to sleep, 
And they that mourn forget to weep, 

Beneath that gentle light ? " 

And wliat is the song that Heni'icus sings, 

Like an angel that spreads his new-come wings ? 

He cliants the hymns that he hears at Church 

To the drone of the dull precentor. 

Who sometimes leaves the choir in the lurch, 

A sorry sort of Mentor ; 

Dirges for dead folk, lauds for the living, 

And evermore Thanksgiving, 

Then to the tinkle of light guitars. 

Under Venetian moon and stars, 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 245 

He trills, where gondolas glide, 
'His donna by his side. 
" Fair Juliet ! oh ! ease the woe 
Of your heart-breaking Romeo ; 
O Rosaline ! be love of mine, 
For my sick soul doth peak and pine. 
Marino ! no, it must not be ; 
Fly for your life, O Foscari ! 
Or the Doges will cease to wed the sea ! 
The Bucentaur will nevermore 
Put proudly from old Adria's shore; 
For note, a Shadow mounting stark 
Upon the Wing'd Steed of St. Mark ! 
Whence doth that fearful cry arise ? 
What dark Shape crosses the Bridge of Sighs ? 
The Council of Ten are One — 
The deed of death will be done." 



The pupil becomes Professor 

Of Languages and Letters ; 

Able they knew at twenty-two 

To teach his elders — not betters ; 

For better than poets none can be, 

So their hearts are high and their souls are free. 

Imagine where our Professor went, 

Seeking the clerkly Continent ; 

Over the sunk Atlantides ; 

Between the Pillars of Hercules ; 

Past Calpe, and the Afric shore. 

Where Hanno sailed in days of yore, 



246 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

Dipping his weary oar 

From Nothing into the Nevermore — 

For Carthage is fall'n, and Hannibal 

Has gone — great hero — the way of all 1 

Conceive the course our Pilot steered, 

The coasts that appeared and disappeared, 

The mirror of blue 

His bark went through, 

The mountains that rose and sunk again, 

The firmament and the under-plain ; 

Hither and thither, as sea-birds wheel, 

Pushes his prow and glides his keel ; 

Jason reaching the Golden Fleece, 

And the Isle of the Hesperides, 

Where the guarded apples are rosy mellow, 

And drop in the hands of this good fellow : 

Evoe Bacchus ! lo Pcean ! 

Over the waves of the glad ^gean ! 

(LONGFELLOW VATES LOQUITUR.) 

" Genius of Petrarch! guide my willing pen, 
While I essay therewith an amorous lay, 
Such as tliou shapedst for Laura — well-a-day, 

Priest as thou wert, thou hadst the lover's ken; 

So had thy greater, Dante, man of men, 
For grimly daring in the downward way. 
To the Inferno, whence its punished may 

Perchance emerge — oh ! tell us, Vergil, when ? 

A nun my spirit hath perceived in dreams, 
Like her whom Milton saw through Cambridge trees, 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 247 

What time lie slumbered by the reedy shore 
Of Camus, lucidest of poetic streams, 
Sacred to chaste Sabrina, couched at ease 
On sliding waves that waft her back no more. 

Lordlings, will ye hear me tell, 
If I can, of poor Rudel ? 
How the dreamer lived to reach 
The far Tripolitan beach, 
Though he was deprived of speech; 
How the Countess, as was meet, 
Kissed him, dying at her feet ? 
Or is Pierre Vidal your friend, 
Who of Troubadours was first, 
Who celebrated each diurna. 
Now Le Louve and now Na Viei'na, 
Fond and fickle to the end ? 
No ; a manlier strain be muie : 
True love, losing, does not whine ; 
Such a gracious strain was thine, 
Masterful Poet, most Divine ! 



Shut here at Bankside by the loathed stage. 
My fancy wanders through Verona's streets, 
Where by the moonlight in unnatural rage 
Rash Romeo, reft of reason, Tybalt meets ; 
So would not I my lover, who I know 
Doth much abuse my poor, confiding faith. 
Wild Heart ! why trample on thy vassal so, 
Strange Rose of Beauty, who arts till my scathe ? 



248 HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW. 

Can no two men be true when comes between 
Their twin-dear souls a woman — fiend, I say, 
For such is she, my bane, tliat is thy Queen, 
Poor Marlowe's fatal Hero, born to slay. 
But her I love no longer ; stronger far 
Over me rises now a western star. 

The Phosphor Nun sets slowly where I am, 

Behind these dim old wharves of Rotterdam ; 

But Hesper fioateth hither, for she sees 

I yearn for the rich dusk of Cambridge trees, 

The shadows of my immemorial elms, 

Wherethrough a sunset glory overwhelms 

The life that is, foretelling that to be, 

When she I love bethinks her to love me ; 

And from our heaven-made marriage nuptial joys 

Shall bourgeon into beauteous girls and boys. 

Whose tiny feet, that creep in unawares. 

Tick with the half -heard Clock upon the stairs, 

Under the roof that sheltered One 

Who was the New World's noblest son. 

Fatherless father of generations, 

Which will break into sorest lamentations 

When he, who is as strong as just, 

Sinks down, as all must sink, to dust ; 

Going down, as I — I see my going — 

Not when June winds but March are blowing, 

Done to death, but not afraid. 

Who made will care for what He made. 

Rapt in a wind of prophecy 

(Or does a Presence speak through me ?) 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 249 

I know to-day what I sliall be. 

Not of myself — I am but lent, 

To Something a ready mstrument, 

Subject to that, as to winds the lute. 

Powerless the high gods to salute — 

Nothing, but all when breathed upon 

By the awful mouth of the Unseen One ! 

Therefore I say that I shall teach 

Thousands in sinewy Saxon speech. 

Out of French, German, and Spanish 

Recall what the ages strove to banish : 

Chansons as light as a humming-bird's wing ; 

A song of sorrow a seraph might sing 

(" Yo el Re!'' doth Death repeat 

To Don Jorge in the skirmish near Canavete) ; 

The three Worlds of the Florentine, 

"Whose soul re-risen hath entered mine; 

A Danish stave, where cannon roar ; 

A tavern-ballad of Elsinore, 

Trolled in the castle where Hamlet dwells, 

Where the jester Yorick jangles his bells ; 

A quiet alehouse on the Rhine, 

Whei'e I with other old comrades dine, 

Burschen all, and dozens of stein, 

(There is no harm in this good wine) ; 

Lays such as Michael Drayton sang, 

Whose lines like swords upon armor rang; 

Homeric hexameters restored 

To honor the Supper of our Lord ; 

Caldei'on, a little sub rosa, 

To glance at the dancing of Preciosa ; 



250 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 



Belgic carillons (none can be purer) ; 

The Nuremberg of Albrecht Diirer; 

A-building- of ships, and sailor lore; 

The lost playmate that comes no more ; 

Indian Eddas, old as the leaves 

That whirl through their woods on autumn eves; 

Spix'its of bird and beast at one, 

Human as we, when all is done ; 

The elements in their natural shapes, 

What pursues and what escapes ; 

Runic sages, rough and wrong; 

Tartar, mayhap, and Turkman song; 

A Golden Legend, not beat out thin ; 

A hundred Tales of a Wayside Inn ; 

Rabbis, musicians, scientists, doctors, 

Very reverend dons and proctors ; 

There will be no end to the songs I sing, 

Till the cold hand shattei's my string. 

Then the world will own it has missed us, 

When we quit it like Trismegistus ! 

These make me beloved in a hundred lands, 

And give me the grasp of a million hands, 

The friendship of man, woman, child. 

Who are to mortality reconciled. 

Poets will love me, peoples ci'own — 

With one only sorrow that will not down ; 

Darkly it looms like a funeral pyre 

Where what was woman is lapped in fire ! 

Jesxi merci ! But no, if it must, 

Let the heavens fall, we know Whom to trust. 

The end will come when my beard is white, 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 251 

Will suddenly come in a still March night. 
For hark ! I hear — they are drawing near — 
The clamorous, sorrowful bells 
Wlierewith Mount Auburn tells 
That a singer has crossed its portals 
And joined the immortals. 
The holy Mount Auburn bells 
Are pealing their farewell knells." 

THE BELLS. 

Funera plango ! 
Fulgura frango ! 
Sabbata pango ! 

Kyrie eleison ! 

Christe eleison ! 

Passion Sundat, March 25-26, 1882. 



THE END. 



